Why We Never Learn

We’ve all made bad decisions and, whether we believe it or not, we’ve made many-fold more good decisions over the course of our life. Why is it so hard to learn from those experiences and apply them to make us more effective right now?

I think the problem is that most of us don’t have an explicit process for analyzing our past decisions. We just hope the lessons are already running on our brains like some kind of an automatic software update. Is this really the best strategy?

Most of us know the experience of making the same mistakes that we know we’ve made in the past. And, from time to time, most of us struggle with important decisions, second-guessing ourselves and holding our decision-making to an impossibly high standard. We know logically that we’re good decision-makers, but in the moment, it certainly doesn’t feel that way.  We need a new strategy. 

The US military has a formalized strategy for using past experiences to accelerate learning and increase accountability for team members. It’s called the After Action Review (AAR) and has been around for decades. The technique has proven so effective that countless civilian companies now use AAR to improve their organizational learning and performance. Sounds pretty good, right?

Perhaps the AAR process can help? What if we had a structured process for evaluating our past decisions in order to bring those lessons forward for future ones? As long as it doesn’t require me to wake up at 0500 and run 6 miles, I’m game. What could go wrong? 

A few things, actually…

We don’t think of our lives in “missions”. In the military, missions are a big deal. Impossible to miss. The majority of our respective lives are not like that. Sure, every now and then we have to make a really big decision or accomplish some significant task, but for the most part, we’re just living our day-to-day lives. Small decisions. Small jobs. The full collection of the big and small comprise our reality.

Wouldn’t we want to have a better process for making ALL of our decisions, not just the kind that occur every once in a while? I think so. In order to do this, we’d need a way to apply the concept of the AAR to everyday life, when the “objects” of our evaluation process may not be as obvious.

We have terrible memory. In theory, we each have a lifetime of data, archived and available for evaluation. Shouldn’t we be able to feed that wealth of data into our supercomputer brains and set ourselves up for awesome decision-making? Unfortunately, no. We are incredibly bad at remembering that kind of information. We’ll likely remember a decision that we made, but not likely to remember the factors that went into it. We won’t remember the feelings and emotions that were at work at the time we made the decision. At least not accurately. To the extent that we think we remember all the details, more than likely we are reconstructing them to match our current reality and biases. We need to devise a workaround strategy to compensate for our fallible memory.

We over-focus on outcomes. Most of us are very outcome driven. We measure, a.k.a. judge, ourselves based purely on the results that we get. If the outcome of a decision is undesirable, we likely label that a “bad decision.” If like the outcome, that was a “good decision.” This type of thinking creates a high-pressure situation. We can’t make a bad decision because that will lead to a bad outcome. At the same time, we can’t know whether a decision is good or bad UNTIL we know the outcome. This is not only high-pressure, it’s logically impossible. If AAR is going to do anything for us, we need to overcome the outcome bias.

We don’t want to be accountable. We love accountability when it’s us holding other people accountable for their shortcomings. But most of us roll a bit slower when it comes to taking accountability for our own fumbles. We prefer to blame any undesirable outcomes on external factors that were beyond our control. The military does not use the AAR to assess blame. Rather, the entire team is there to support and challenge each other to take full accountability for what happened. The process is designed to focus on learning, not for pointing fingers. We need a way to learn from our past mistakes without putting ourselves down or getting caught up in the blame-game.

At this point, it’s pretty clear to me the traditional AAR process isn’t going to work at a personal level. At the same time, I think there’s still hope. In the video portion, I’ll walk through some strategies that I think we can employ to make for an effective, Personal-AAR process. Check it out!

Prosperous Journey,

-zog

Photocredit: https://pixabay.com/users/tentes-682637/