Don't confuse good and bad outcomes with good and bad decisions

As a young lieutenant in the United States Army, I once made a really bad decision (okay, in full disclosure, it was probably one of many bad decisions I made over the course of my service). This one, however, had potentially fatal implications, yet here I am to tell about it. So it couldn't have been that bad of a decision, right?

It was January of 2004, and my unit was just about to return home after 11 months deployed in Kuwait and Iraq. While the majority of the soldiers in our unit were departing on a ground convoy from northern Iraq to the port in Kuwait to load our vehicles onto cargo ships, a small number of us had a mush cushier ride home lined up.

The Air Force was going to airlift our 24 Apache helicopters stateside, and the pilots and crew chiefs for those aircraft were going to get to ride along on the Air Force C-17 cargo planes, which was a much more desirable prospect than a 1,000 kilometer drive through hostile territory with a strengthening insurgency.

I was in charge of the last ferry flight of three helicopters to go from our base in Qayyarah?to the airport in Mosul. It was only about a 35 mile flight, which under normal circumstances would take less than 20 minutes. But on the morning we were scheduled to go, the circumstances were anything but normal.

People who haven't been to the middle east often have visions of it being a hot, arid desert. While that does accurately describe many places for a lot of the year, northern Iraq in the winter can get pretty cold and rainy. And so it was on this particular morning. Not an all out rainstorm, but rather a constant drizzle with a low overcast cloud cover and low visibility.

Any student pilot can tell you weather like that generally puts the kibosh on flights that need to operate under visual meteorological conditions (of which all Apache helicopter flights do). But there was a problem - or at least a perceived problem - that was our day to go home! And despite the unfavorable weather conditions, we had a "legal" weather briefing saying that cloud ceilings were at 1,000 feet and there were 3 miles of visibility.

So despite all six of us pilots being more than aware that a bad case of get-home-itis has led to many fatal aviation mishaps over the years, we launched.

It was probably the most harrowing flight I've ever made. What would normally have been less than a 20 minute flight took us almost an hour. We crept along at what seemed like a snail's pace, zigging and zagging towards areas with better visibility. I even found myself using our aircraft's targeting laser to measure how far we could actually see (hint: it wasn't 3 miles). And just south of the Mosul airport, we knew there was a massive set of power lines we would have to fly over. Later that very week, a helicopter in our sister battalion unfortunately had a fatal mishap after an aircraft struck those very same power lines.

But in the end, everything turned out fine. We made it safely to the Mosul airport. Our crew chiefs were extremely industrious and had the aircraft cleaning, prep, and loading down to a science, so after landing they wanted us officers to just stay out of their way. So I spent the week largely binge watching CSI, had a direct flight home with only a short, unanticipated layover in Frankfurt, Germany (that's a whole other story), and only a day after I returned stateside I met my yet-to-be wife.

Overall, a more than acceptable outcome. So I must not have made that bad of a decision, right? And therein lies the fallacy ...

Confusing decision outcomes with decision quality

Looking back on it, I know that I made a horrible decision to launch our flight that morning. Our desire to get home outweighed any sound decision-making we would have exercised under almost any other circumstances.

But I learned from it. On my next deployment to Iraq in 2005, unless a flight mission was to support troops in direct contact with the enemy, I was much more conservative about under which weather conditions I would and would not launch. I divorced my consideration of the prior outcome under less than favorable weather with any future decision.

But that's where many people into the business world fall into a mental trap. Business leaders are faced with numerous high-profile decisions in their careers, some of them being potential career killers if the outcome isn't favorable. But the quality of a decision is never the only thing that affects the outcome. Unanticipated things happen. Maybe the market shifts. Maybe a competitor innovates. Maybe a global pandemic happens... Sometimes these external factors have a minimal impact on outcomes, but sometimes they have a deciding impact, regardless of the quality of a decision.

It's been over a decade since I graduated from business school, yet I still distinctly remember the discussion about one particular case study in an Operations Management class. In the case, a biotech company was faced with decisions around plant expansion to create manufacturing capacity for future demand. The planning, building, and certification of a new production-scale plant takes multiple years and hundreds of millions of dollars. In short, the kind of thing you want to make a really good decision on.

I don't remember the exact details of what went wrong with the real world company's situation, but the gist was that the investment for the expansion didn't go well. What I do remember, however, was how much the tone of our class discussion shifted towards how their management team made errors in their analysis, overlooked some key information, and generally made other mistakes that led to a poor decision.

I wasn't exactly a wallflower in business school, but I also didn't feel compelled to speak just to hear the sound of my voice. That was one time, however, when I felt compelled to share with the class that lesson I had learned many times in the Army: good (or bad) decisions don't necessarily lead to good (or bad) outcomes. In the case study alone, we didn't have enough information to assess the quality of their decision-making processes. The bad outcome could have come, at least in part, from circumstances out of their control.

To give an extremely simplistic example, next month is my family's annual beach trip. I could decide not to wear my seatbelt at all for the 300 mile drive down I-65, and in the end there's a very high probability that we'll arrive safe and sound. But I doubt anyone would argue that not wearing my seatbelt would be a wise decision on my part.

Improve organizational decision-making

So what can business leaders do to continue to improve their own decision-making, but more importantly that of their organization?

1. Don't use outcomes as the sole measure of decision quality. Recognize the role that random chance and other factors play. Instead, try to focus on the decision-making processes that happened and if they were sound or not.
2. Conduct a post-mortem (in Army parlance, an "After Action Review"). Use this opportunity to assess how much a decision did influence the outcome, uncover what the other influencing factors were, and learn more the how the "system" works, so that you can make better decisions in the future.
3. Don't base performance evaluations, promotions, or compensation awards primarily upon the results that an employee delivers. This risks reinforcing the bad decision-making processes of some. By all means, do consider the results, but also use those rewards to highlight and reinforce good decision-making practices.
4. Foster a culture conducive to employees sharing their own stories of failure so that people can learn from each other. Learning from your own mistakes can be invaluable, but learning from others before you make a similar mistake can lessen the organizational impact of a bad decision.