Source: Jeromey Balderrama/Unsplash
We all have moments when we underperform. When mistakes occur, most of us are highly motivated to perform better next time.
To do that, we must intelligently understand what went wrong. However, some cognitive and emotional pitfalls are common when people try to accurately understand their failures. Here’s how to avoid manageable errors in your analysis so you can excel next time.
1. Give yourself 24-48 hours to feel your feelings first.
Emotions such as intense disappointment, shock and panic are not conducive to flexible long-term thinking. Trying to think carefully while feeling these emotions can do more harm than good. A knee-jerk defensiveness can damage relationships, your reputation, and dig a bigger hole. Let your emotions disappear first.
That said, if other people are quarterbacking first thing Monday morning, this period of emotional vulnerability can occasionally lead to useful insights. For example, a person might say something about problems that he foresaw but was too afraid to mention, or he might say that he thought it was inappropriate to share his opinion at an earlier, more useful point. You can plan how you will gain divergent insights sooner rather than later.
2. Limit your analysis to targeted time slots.
In the weeks following a failure, there is no point in thinking about what happened all day, every day, or allowing thoughts about it to often interfere with your other activities. That’s rumination. It doesn’t help you think clearly or solve problems.
Instead, spend specific time slots in your day analyzing the outage. Maybe you allow yourself to think about it every weekday from 9:00 am to 9:30 am. The rest of the day, if you have thoughts about the experience, redirect your thoughts attention.
3. Keep an open mind about the consequences of failure.
It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that a big, significant failure (especially a public failure) will have negative consequences for the trajectory of your life. That is not always the case. There can be all kinds of outcomes, such as:
- A bad loss pushes you to solve fundamental problems that a narrow victory would not have caused
- The failure has little impact
- The loss causes you to move from a path you were less talented at, to a path that suits you better
In reality, you can’t accurately predict the consequences of failure, so thinking about it is often not helpful or accurate.
4. Have a system in place to avoid common reasoning errors.
Imagine coming 8th in a race you expected to win. You expected the race to go too fast, so you planned to hold back and then move through the pack. In reality, the race was slow at first, and your race plan had not prepared you for that.
In response, you may focus too much on not making the same mistake in the future, but neglect to prepare for other scenarios. This is a common mistake known as “fighting the last war.”
To avoid this, you can use probing questions. For example:
- “Imagine I lose my next race, but for completely different reasons. What could those reasons be?”
- “If the start of the race had gone perfectly, what other factors could have caused the loss?”
- “What would my strategy look like if I completely ignored this one factor?”
This is not the only relevant common fallacy. Others to avoid include: confirmation biasego, emotional response, overgeneralization, loss aversion, fear by innovationsurvival instinct prejudiceshort term bias, groupthinkexcessive focus on statistics, attribution errors and the sunk cost fallacy.
Develop an assessment plan with one or two questions to challenge each of these biases. For example, the question: “If my time or place was not recorded, how would I rate my performance?” can help overcome an excessive focus on statistics (at the expense of other insights).
5. Try the “five whys” or similar backward reasoning techniques to understand your faulty assumptions.
Let’s continue with the racing scenario. If you determined that your incorrect assumption was that the race would be too fast, why and when did you make that assumption? What was the assumption underlying that assumption?
Keep going back and asking yourself the same question again to identify key decision points and key faulty assumptions. Doing this can help you make plans to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed when analyzing failure. Keep it simple and focus on the big rocks. By giving yourself compassion throughout the process, you will remain flexible and agile in your thinking. Be visionary. Be careful not to fall into the trap of fighting the last war.
Leave a Reply