This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

So years ago, back when I was managing a group of engineers, we were putting putting together a proposal for a big out-of-town job. Technically, it was kind of awesome. It was the kind of job the team would fight over. One of my engineers was a perfect fit, young, ambitious, super smart, and really keen on the topic of this project.

She was also a young mother, and I knew she really valued her time with her son. Now, this gig was out of town, heavy on travel, little bit of an unknown duration. So I figured she probably wouldn’t be interested in it. I mean, obviously, it would impact her time with her son. So I never put her name forward.

Well, we won the job and the team deployed. And a little while later, she came and asked me why she wasn’t on that team. So I told her the truth. I told her that I’d made the decision for her without asking.

Not cool.

Now that’s not really what this episode is about though.

Getting a call wrong isn’t the interesting part. What you do after is

When a pump trips in the plant, you write an incident report, you do a root cause analysis, you figure out what actually happened.

When a leadership call goes sideways, most of us do one of two things.

We replay it over and over again, usually at two in the morning, running through that conversation and wondering what we could have or should have done differently. Rewriting what we should have said. And it feels like analysis, but it isn’t. It’s just a continuous loop with no exit condition.

Or we write it off. Bad luck, a one-off, somebody else’s fault. Case closed.

Neither one of those produces anything. So the next call runs through the exact same process and you get the exact same result.

There’s two things that make this harder than it should be. And engineers already know both of them. At least they know them from the plant environment.

First, outcome isn’t decision quality. The equipment tripping doesn’t necessarily prove that the set point was wrong. Sometimes you make the right call and it goes badly. Sometimes you make a sloppy one and get lucky. Judge yourself on the outcome alone and you’ve learned the wrong lesson both ways.

Second, memory rewrites the record. A week later, you don’t remember what you knew then. You remember what you know now, after the fact. that’s why the plant logs events when they happen. It’s too bad people don’t.

But we can change that. And here’s a simple way to log it. It’s one page and a couple of minutes. but make sure it’s within forty eight hours of the call. And it’s just four questions.

What did I expect to happen?

What actually happened?

What did I know or could have known at the time? And

what would I change about how I decided?

Not what I decided, how I decided it. That fourth one is the whole point. The first three, they’re just there to keep that for that last one honest. So let me run my story through it.

What did I expect? Honestly, I thought I was protecting her and her time with her son. I was. Well, I thought I was being a good manager.

What actually happened? Well, she found out about the project, watched the others go, and then asked why she wasn’t on the list.

What did I know? Well, I knew she was ambitious, and I knew she put family first. I held both of those, but I only gave weight to one. And what she actually wanted was one question away. But that was a question I never asked.

So what would I change? It’s actually not I should have picked her. That’s hindsight about the answer. The real problem is that it wasn’t my call. I owned the staffing on that project, but she owned whether the travel worked for her life. I collapsed those into one decision, and then I made it.

Now, the funny part is, after the fact, when I did ask her if she would have gone, she said no, which was the same decision as mine. But she owned that decision, not me. And if I’d judged that call on the outcome, there’d be nothing to reveal. It’s the same answer. That’s exactly why the outcome can’t be the test.

On that scenario, the part that bugs me the most is that it never felt like a decision. I didn’t decide against her necessarily. I just didn’t put her name forward. Omissions don’t trip alarms, so they almost never get reviewed.

Now, this scenario, it happens a lot, especially to parents and particularly to mothers, and it compounds over a career. It almost always comes from good intentions. Mine certainly did, but that didn’t make it right.

What did come out of it was simple. From that point forward, before I answered anything on someone else’s behalf, I asked one question. Whose decision is this? And if it wasn’t mine, I stopped answering it.

Now, it’s not just parents and travel. It’s that stretch assignment you don’t offer because he’s already swamped. It’s that client you don’t put someone on because she’d probably hate it. They’re the same move. You’re answering a question that isn’t yours to answer.

So the postmortem produced a pre-check for me. And that’s what the review is for. Not to feel bad and not to feel better, but to change how the next decision gets made.

So here’s something to try next week. The next time a leadership call goes sideways, don’t replay it and don’t write it off. Write four lines on the page within the first 48 hours. Then look at line four and ask whether it’s the same answer you wrote last time or would have written last time. And if it is.

That’s your pattern. That’s data, not introspection.

That’s it for this one. We’ll keep going next week.