Hindsightful

I want to coin a word. hindsightful: looking at other people’s past decisions and judging them in the light of the present context while thinking you knew better all along.

Let’s take an example: Mary and Joe each lead a project, and they are equally skilled. In the light of competing interests on Mary’s project, she has to make a choice. She talks to Joe about the options she has, and while they are aware of the potential pitfalls of the preferred option, they both conclude that this option is the best anyway. A year later, all the potential pitfalls turn out to be the reality and Mary’s project is in rough shape. When their boss Bill asks Joe about what went wrong with that project, he explains how the choice Mary made was a bad idea and that he had told her a year ago about it.

While Joe’s behavior is common with office politicians who believe that “getting ahead” is faster when done at the expense of others, I was surprised to find it can come from a legitimate feeling rather than just as a means to self-promote.

Hindsight bias has been well documented, and leads to a genuine feeling in the person experiencing it. “I knew it all along” is not just a vacuous sentence, it is coming from your brain telling you that it was true. But here is the key component of the story that make is more than hindsight bias: Joe was aware of the potential problems (even if the time it seemed like the best alternative), so he actually knew all along.

What can we tell about Joe here ?

Maybe there was a better alternative than the one that Mary picked. In this case Joe failed to assess it properly (since he agreed with Mary about picking the “bad” option).

Or maybe at the time this was actually the best alternative. Imagine that you and your team are trapped in a factory on fire with the only thing laying around between you and the raging fire are sheets of asbestos. The firefighters have been called, it will take them 30mn to reach you and by that time you and your team most likely will burn alive, or in a few minutes, you can make a shelter with the sheets of asbestos, which is a superb fire insulator and would protect you for about hour, but can also cause cancer when handled without protection. You pick building the asbestos shelter, the firefighter come, rescue you and your team as you were protected by the shelter and you are all saved. A few years down the road one team member is diagnosed with cancer. Did you make the right call when building the shelter ? Probably, right ? You knew full well that the asbestos could cause cancer, but given a certain death by fire, this was probably the right thing to do.

And herein lies the problem of hindsight. Not only we amplify the current problems and overestimate how much we understood them at the time, but more often than not, we do not see what problems the ‘failed’ alternative prevented in the first place. It takes serious work to understand the successful parts of the work the people who failed before us did. It also takes humility to recognize that there is something to learn in a failure, and not just what to avoid, but what parts were good too.

So next time find yourself looking at someone else’s work and “What were they thinking ?” comes to mind, ask yourself this: are you being hindsightful ?