Decision Making - Clarity Over Time.

What Happens After the Decision Matters Just as Much.

Some decisions feel complete the moment they’re made.

Others linger. Not because the outcome is unclear, but because the process behind it was.

If clarity in the moment is difficult and clarity in teams is delicate, then clarity over time is its own kind of challenge. It becomes distorted by memory, emotion, outcome and hindsight.

Yet, it’s here that most learning and most leadership, actually lives.

You made the best call you could with the information you had, but something about it still unsettles you.

You wonder what others thought, question whether you overlooked something. You replay the moment, knowing you can’t change it, but wishing you’d seen it differently at the time.

This is the emotional landscape of real-world decision making.

This is rarely talked about.

We praise decisiveness, reward results, but we don’t always create space for reflection. At least, not the kind that builds identity, fosters resilience, or protects long-term clarity.

Clarity over time is its own kind of challenge. — Clarity over *time* is its own kind of challenge.

Why Reflection Is Hard, But Necessary.

When we look back, we don’t just see what happened. We see it through a filter of outcome, emotion and hindsight.

This leads to predictable distortions:

Hindsight bias: “I knew it all along.”
Fundamental attribution error: Blaming people, not systems.
Outcome bias: Judging the decision by how things turned out, not how it was made.
Rosy retrospection: Minimising difficulty to make success feel cleaner.

These are natural human biases.

However, when left unchecked they prevent learning and replace understanding with judgment. This can make review feel like punishment instead of progress.

Which is why real clarity isn’t just about how we decide. It’s about how we revisit those decisions later and what kind of culture makes that safe to do.

Every decision is data, every mistake.. learning.

What High-Reliability Cultures Know About Learning.

In high-stakes environments, every decision is a data point. Every mistake, a potential lesson.

Those lessons only surface if people feel safe enough to examine what went wrong and be honest enough to acknowledge it.

That’s why high-reliability organisations invest as much in reflection as they do in action.

Key principles they follow are:

Just (restorative) Culture

People are not held accountable for human error within complex systems. The focus is on understanding the conditions that made a mistake possible and what part of the system design was deficient. Only in circumstances of deliberate harm or negligence is somebody sanctioned.

Double-Loop Learning

Coined by Chris Argyris, this approach asks teams to question not just the decision, but the beliefs and assumptions behind it.

Not “Why did we do that?”

but “Why did that seem like the right thing to do?”

Systemic Review, Not Blame

Instead of asking “Who got this wrong?”, the question becomes:

What information was available at the time?
What were we expecting to happen?
Where did our model of the situation diverge from reality?

This kind of clarity isn’t always comfortable, but it builds something deeper than confidence.

It builds trust.

Trust is the first step to learning and..

Learning fixes the broken system.

Reflection as a Habit, Not a Post-Mortem.

In everyday work, formal reviews are rare, but clarity over time still depends on building informal habits of reflection.

Simple, repeatable prompts that help you and your team revisit decisions with openness, not self-recrimination.

Try this:

Start with what went well.

Before diving into flaws, name three things that worked. This isn’t about being positive for its own sake, it’s about giving a balanced view. Most decisions are a mix of insight, error and luck.

Try to see the whole picture.

Name the context, not just the choice.

What were you trying to protect? What values guided you? What pressure shaped the moment?

Clarity over time, depends on revisiting not just the facts but the frame you were operating in.

Ask: Would I make the same call again, with what I knew then?

This separates reflection from regret and It respects the decision as a product of time, knowledge and intention, not just outcome.

The Three Legged Stool and balanced decisions.

Ethics, Integrity and the Three-Legged Stool.

In complex settings, there’s often no “perfect” choice.

There’s only the best balance between competing needs.

In aviation and many other industries a metaphor called the “three-legged stool,” is used to help there are competing interests to be considered.

It originated in 1949 when Mr Reinhard A. Hohaus, an actuary for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, spoke at a forum on social security in Ohio.

Each leg represents one area that must be considered to make a balanced decision, what they represent depends on the industry in question.

In Hohauss example when speaking about income in retirement, they were:

Social Security
Private Pension
Savings & Investments

All three must be considered, but sometimes, one has to take priority.

What matters most is that the decision-maker recognises the trade-off and can justify it with clarity.

That’s where ethics lives:

Not in knowing the “right” answer all the time, but in navigating the grey with humility, honesty and foresight.

One useful framing is this:

If you had to explain this choice to someone you deeply respect, someone outside the pressure you were under, would it make sense and would you stand by it?

Not to seek approval, more to check your compass.

Clarity Becomes Culture.

When people learn to reflect without shame, they grow.

When teams make review normal, not exceptional, learning accelerates.

When organisations talk openly about missteps without assigning blame, they evolve faster and protect the humans at the heart of their decisions.

This kind of culture starts with a question.

One that leaders ask themselves first and then ask their teams regularly.

“What did we learn?”

“What surprised us?”

“What would we do differently next time and what will we carry forward?”

In time, these questions stop feeling like interventions and become rituals. Quiet, steady ways to build clarity.

The full story shows why decisions get made the way they do.

The Decision Is Only Part of the Story.

The moment you make a decision matters, but so does what comes before it and what comes after.

Preparation gives you clarity under pressure.

Collaboration gives you clarity in teams.

Reflection? That gives you clarity over time, the kind that shapes identity, deepens trust and builds cultures where better decisions become the norm.