Learning from your past

A time of change forces us to take decisions based on little information and without knowing how things are going to turn out.

One way to become better at this is by learning from our past — especially when things didn’t turn out in the way we wanted or expected.

To do this, first think back to a time when you took a decision where events didn’t turn out in the way you wanted or expected.

Then ask yourself four questions:

What was the situation? What was the choice you made? What did you expect to happen? What happened instead?
What story did you tell yourself about this at the time? Did you judge it as a ‘failure’? Did you tell yourself that you ‘should‘ have done something different or known what the outcome was going to be? Did you blame yourself or others for the way things turned out? Most importantly, with hindsight, what other interpretations are also possible? Was it simply bad luck, impossible to predict?
With hindsight, what other actions might you have taken instead — to ignore the situation, fix it, leave it, improve it, or prevent it from arising in the first place? And how might you have chosen to learn from the situation?
Knowing all this now, would you still make the same choice again? Or would you choose a different action?

To get the maximum benefit, answer these four questions before you read on.

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What was your answer to the fourth question?

If you decided that you would still make the same choice today then that teaches you that you can trust the choices you make now. Because even if things don’t turn out in the way you want or expect, it is still the right choice for you to make.

And if you decided that you would make a different choice then that also means that you can trust the choices you make today because even if things don’t turn out in the way you want or expect, you will still be able to learn from what happens and make a better choice next time — just as the unexpected outcomes of your past have taught you what you know today.

In this time of massive change, no-one can predict what is going to happen. And with so much change happening so fast, all we can know for certain is that many things are going to turn out differently from the way we want and expect. That is just the way it is.

What matters now is no longer the ability to predict what is going to happen or find the ‘right’ answer. In an uncertain world, what matters most is the ability to recover quickly when things don’t turn out in the ways we want or expect. And the best way to achieve that is by being clear who we are and what matters most to us, letting go of our assumptions about the situation, finding the opportunities, choosing our best way forward, managing our upsides and downsides, and inspiring ourselves and others to long to make our chosen goal happen — knowing that we won’t always get it right and that is OK, because even when the situation turns out differently from the way we wanted or expected we can still learn and move forward.

This is the attitude that enabled Thomas Edison to invent the lightbulb. Each time he failed he said:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Learning from our past, and especially learning from times when things didn’t turn out in the ways we wanted or expected, enables us to take another step towards becoming antifragile.

Over the next six months, is it going to become more useful or less useful for you to be able to take decisions based on little information or without knowing how things are going to turn out? What are you doing to prepare for that?

Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.

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Photo By Markus Binzegger via StockPholio.net