People can do everything right and still lose

One of the harder things to accept in professional life is that a good decision does not always produce a good result. We know this, but we rarely behave as if we do.

When a deal closes, we tend to assume the strategy was right. When a business struggles, it becomes surprisingly easy to explain what the founder should have done differently. Someone gets promoted and we attribute it to performance. Someone else does not and starts wondering what they lacked.

The outcome becomes the evidence.

That is not always a good way to judge a decision.

Over the years, I have seen strong proposals lose for reasons that had very little to do with the proposal itself. The other side already had a relationship. Someone internally preferred another vendor. The budget changed. In some cases, the decision had practically been made before the final meeting took place.

I have also seen the opposite. Average preparation, questionable assumptions, fortunate timing, and the result still went in the right direction.

Most of us would prefer effort, judgement and outcome to remain closely connected. It makes life easier to understand. Work hard, prepare well, make sensible choices and the result should eventually follow.

Except there are too many variables we do not control.

Markets move. People change their minds. Organisations restructure. A person you hired carefully does not work out. A role that looked right turns out to be completely wrong. A good product arrives at the wrong time. A company can make several perfectly reasonable decisions and still run out of money.

None of this is an argument against accountability.

Calling every failure bad luck would be just as foolish as assuming every success proves good judgement.

The useful distinction is between the quality of the decision and the quality of the result.

Given what I knew at the time, was this a sensible call?

Did I ask the right questions? Did I understand what could go wrong? Was I ignoring information because I did not like what it suggested? Was I making a judgement or simply hoping things would improve?

Those questions tell us much more than whether the client eventually signed or the investment eventually paid off.

The distinction becomes more important as responsibility grows.

Early in a career, much of the job is execution. Do the work properly. Deliver when you said you would. Follow through.

Senior roles are different.

The decisions are often the ones where nobody actually knows the answer.

Which market deserves investment? Which customer should we walk away from? Who should we hire? How long should we continue funding something that is not working? Should we enter now or wait? Should we keep fixing the existing business or build something new?

If the answer were obvious, it would not require much judgement.

And these decisions are usually made before all the information is available.

A commercial leader can walk away from a client whose economics make no sense and watch a competitor announce the account the following week. A founder can reject an investor who is clearly the wrong fit and then spend another six months struggling to raise money.

Judged only by what happened next, both decisions can look stupid.

That is where organisations can get into trouble as well.

Companies frequently say they want people to take ownership, make decisions and think like owners. But if every unsuccessful decision is later treated as evidence of poor judgement, people understand the message very quickly.

They stop making difficult decisions.

They make defensible ones.

There is a difference.

You cannot ask people to take ownership while also expecting every decision they own to work.

What matters is whether the thinking was sound. What information was available? What assumptions were being made? Were the risks understood? Was somebody taking a considered risk, or simply being careless?

If organisations cannot distinguish between those things, they eventually create managers who are very good at avoiding blame.

There is a more personal version of the same problem.

A setback can stop being an event and quietly become an assessment of ourselves.

You lose an account and start wondering whether you are still as good at your job as you thought you were. A venture fails and the question moves from “What went wrong?” to “Am I actually capable of doing this?” A rejection that may have had several explanations gets reduced to the one that hurts most.

That is where outcomes acquire more authority than they deserve.

There are failures that contain very clear lessons. A bad assumption. Poor preparation. A risk that was obvious but ignored.

Those should hurt a little. They should change something.

But not every setback comes with such a clean explanation.

Sometimes, after going through the decision again and again, the conclusion is much less satisfying.

You made a reasonable call.

It did not work.

We do not talk much about that version of failure because it does not make a very good story.

We prefer the cleaner version. Something goes wrong, a lesson appears, we become stronger and later look back gratefully at the whole experience.

Actual recovery is usually messier.

Sometimes confidence takes a hit. Sometimes you become overly cautious for a while. Sometimes you are simply irritated. Sometimes a decision stays with you much longer than it should.

And sometimes the bigger risk is not the setback itself but what you allow it to change.

One bad hire can turn a thoughtful leader into a suspicious one. One failed partnership can make every new partner look dangerous. One poor investment can make someone so conservative that they miss far better opportunities later.

Not everything we carry forward from experience is wisdom. Sometimes we are simply reacting to what hurt last time.

That, to me, is where resilience becomes useful. Not as the belief that everything will eventually work out. It will not. Not as an obligation to find meaning in every disappointment. And not as pretending that losses do not matter.

It is the ability to stop one bad outcome from making the next decision for you. Over a long enough career, you will make decisions that were right and still failed. You will also make decisions that worked for reasons you would be foolish to repeat.

Experience is learning not to confuse the two.

The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.