The client was on the verge of leaving.
Their frustrations had been building for months. Poor reporting, no structured review process, meetings that never happened.
It came to a head in a meeting they called. William squirmed and offered his excuses. But it was clear to our department head that something had to change.
He handed me the account. For most, the instinct would be to look at what the previous manager had done and conclude he had made the wrong decisions.
That instinct would have been a mistake.
The useful work wasn't judging the outcome. It was going back to what was actually known at the time — what structures had been missing, what a sound process would have looked like.
That's reflective decision making. Not a review of what went wrong, but a deliberate use of the past to inform what comes next.
Not thinking about the past. Using it deliberately.
That review produced something concrete. Single point of contact. Structured reporting. Regular account reviews.
Six months later, a new client arrived. The framework was ready.
The Leader's Guide to Decision Making covers the full decision process. This article gives you both tools.
Reflection Works. Apply It to One Real Decision Now.
You'll finish the week with a decision — knowing what to do and why.
What Reflective Decision Making Actually Is
Most leaders use experience — but they don't examine it.
Reflective decision making has two distinct modes. The first is prospective — drawing on past experience before making a current decision. The second is retrospective — reviewing a specific decision after the outcome to extract what it actually shows, without bias distorting the analysis.
Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the cognitive mechanism that makes both modes possible — what he calls System 2 thinking. Slow, deliberate, effortful.
Most leaders practise Mode 1 poorly and skip Mode 2 entirely. The difference between relying on experience and examining it is where better decisions actually start.
Examined experience is the difference. That's the core argument of how to improve your decision making — and what both tools below are built on.
Before You Decide: What Your Past Is Actually Telling You
Experience is only useful if it's examined.
Unexamined experience imports both the lessons and the biases of the past. The accurate learnings travel with the assumptions, the overconfidence, and the misread conclusions.
The good and the bad travel together.
The question to ask before a significant decision isn't "what does my experience tell me?" It's "what does my experience actually show — and what might it be hiding?"
Taking the time to pause and reflect before acting is where that question gets answered.
Think of a leader making a hiring decision. They've hired dozens of people. Experience says: I know what a strong candidate looks like in an interview. That experience is genuinely valuable.
But examined properly, it might also reveal a pattern. Previous hires who felt right in the first ten minutes were often mirrors — candidates who thought the way the hiring manager thought, not candidates who brought something different.
The experience is real. The conclusion it produces can still be wrong.
Examined experience asks different questions. What did the outcomes actually teach me, as distinct from what I remember feeling? What patterns show up across multiple decisions — not just the vivid or recent ones?
What assumptions am I carrying into this decision from last time — and are they still valid here? That's the line between drawing on experience and being misled by it — and it's the central question intuitive decision making addresses directly.
The past is only as useful as the honesty you bring to it.
After the Outcome: Getting the Lesson Right
Months before the client meeting, there had been a review.
William presented his update. He was senior. He'd been with the business for years.
The department head — recently joined, still finding his footing — caught my eye across the table. He said nothing. Neither did I.
Afterwards, in the corridor, he said: "William says this account is fine, but if I were them, I wouldn't be."
I replied: "I know. It's worse service than we give our small independent customers."
We said in the corridor what we should have said in the room.
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, has spent decades researching exactly this failure. When hierarchy makes honesty feel risky, the honest analysis happens privately — if at all.
The review that should have changed the outcome never gets the chance.
Two biases make this worse. Hindsight bias makes the outcome look more predictable than it was — the decision seems obviously wrong in retrospect, even though the signals weren't clear at the time.
Outcome bias judges the quality of the process by the quality of the result — rather than by what was known when the call was made.
Both feel like honest reflection. Neither is.
A flawed review produces a false lesson. And a false lesson is worse than no lesson — because it produces confident wrong behaviour next time.
The defence is a structured review anchored in what was known then, not what is known now.
Question 1: Was my process sound given what I knew at the time?
Not in hindsight. At the moment the decision was made.
Did you have the relevant information available? Did you consider the realistic options? The question is about the reasoning, not the result.
Some decisions went wrong because the uncertainty was genuinely unresolvable — decision making under uncertainty covers how to tell that difference.
Question 2: What information did I have — and what did I miss?
Not whether the outcome was bad — whether the inputs were properly assessed.
Were the assumptions reasonable given what was available? Was there information you could have sought — or that someone in the room had, but didn't surface?
This is where the genuine learning lives.
Question 3: What would I do differently — and why?
Forward-looking, specific, actionable. Not "I wouldn't have made that call" — that's hindsight talking.
The answer should name a specific change to the process.
If the decision involved communicating a call to a team, leadership communication covers what that process should look like.
Is it a question you'd ask earlier? Or a concern you'd name in the room rather than the corridor.
If you can't name something specific, the review isn't finished.
That applies to individual reviews. Group reviews require one more question.
The three questions are only as honest as the conditions that surround them. Hierarchy suppresses the honest analysis that would improve the review — just as it did in William's account meeting.
Before running a group review, ask: who in this room has a perspective they might not feel safe to share?
Create the space explicitly. Or the corridor conversation will happen again.
Making Both Modes a Habit
The two modes reinforce each other.
A leader who reviews decisions accurately after the outcome builds a more reliable experience base to draw on before the next one. Without Mode 2, Mode 1 compounds the wrong lessons rather than questioning them.
The decision journal is the right tool for both. Before a significant decision, spend five minutes writing down what past experience is relevant — and what it actually shows, not what it feels like it shows.
After an outcome, work through the three questions within 24 to 48 hours — before hindsight bias has fully consolidated.
The journal creates the record that keeps both reviews honest. It also solves the problem that made the William account review fail — it captures what was known at the time, before outcome and hindsight have had the chance to rewrite it.
This is also what makes deliberate decision making framework selection compound over time. A leader who reflects properly before and after decisions builds a progressively more accurate understanding of their own reasoning patterns.
That understanding is the compounding advantage.
Think about a significant decision you made in the last three months. Did you reflect on it — or did you just remember it?
FAQs
Reflection Works. Apply It to One Real Decision Now.
You'll finish the week with a decision — knowing what to do and why.
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