You don’t lack compassion. You lack hygiene.
When it comes to judging the quality of decisions, you may fall prey to resulting: you judge decision quality by outcome quality.
For example, you may assess: a bad outcome = a bad decision
You may be tempted to think less of a colleague or a team member if their efforts have led to a poor outcome.
You chalk the poor outcome up to their character (how good they are) and ignore the circumstances. You discredit their preparation and their thinking by tracking only the outcome and little else.
When this happens, your colleagues may see themselves as hard done by. ‘What a jerk!’ they may wonder about you.
But you’re hardly a jerk. You’re just following your own flawed internal algorithm: good outcome = good decision; bad outcome = bad decision.
You don’t examine decisions. You let the outcome cloud your judgment about the quality of the decision. You forget that sometimes a good decision can precede a bad outcome because of bad luck!
By ignoring the role of luck, you blame others squarely for how things turn out. ‘You should have thought this through’ is your harsh message to them.
When others complain, you point out that you demand the same of yourself. ‘I have the same high standards for myself.’
You’re not lying. You beat yourself up when things don’t go your way. This may be especially true if you’re a high achiever.
Yet, this has got nothing to do with your standards (as you think) or your lack of compassion (as the world thinks).
The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. He may have been talking about resulting.
Luck can loosen the relationship between decision quality and outcome quality. It sometimes crosses the wires–connects a good outcome to a bad decision and a bad outcome to a good decision.
You’re likely to draw wrong conclusions about your self-worth and that of others if you ignore luck. Ignoring luck is a sign of poor decision-making hygiene. It reveals you don’t study your decisions. So, you end up not learning from experience–or worse, learning the wrong lessons!
The good news is that you’re not unkind. The bad news is that the world’s going to disagree with that until you do something about it.
