Stop Resulting

Resulting will destroy your business.

Annie Duke, the poker player, gave this bad little habit a name: resulting.

It means judging the quality of a decision by the outcome instead of the process.

Poker makes this obvious. A good hand loses. A dumb call gets lucky. A brilliant bluff blows up in your face.

The cards don’t care that you had a good reason.

Neither does reality.

And yet every post-mortem in every company eventually slides into the same lazy question:

Did it work?

If yes: good decision.

If no: bad decision.

GROSS.

That feels like accountability. It isn’t!

Accountability is about the decision process. Outcomes are just data.

Here’s the test.

Two employees.

One filed a permit incorrectly. He knew the right process, skipped it anyway, and told someone, “the city never checks this stuff.” Nothing bad happened. In fact, he even saved you a few thousand dollars, because you didn’t have to pay for the permit.

Another made a clerical error that cost you $30,000. Didn’t know. Wasn’t cutting corners. There was no review step. No safeguard. The system just let one small mistake turn into a five-figure problem.

Who do you hold accountable?

If your instinct is “the $30k person,” you’re resulting.

Hard.

The permit guy made a bad decision. And he knew it.

Every time that works, the business gets weaker. Because what you’re actually teaching is: the standard is not “do the right thing.” The standard is “don’t get caught.”

The $30,000 error is different.

That person tried. They didn’t know. The process had no guardrail. Your system allowed a typo, missed field, or wrong click to compound into a real expense.

That is a broken-system problem.

And if you fire that person, congratulations. You just taught the whole team that mistakes are career-ending!

So now they HIDE THEM.

Then nobody tells you anything until the building is already on fire.

Aviation figured this out before most businesses did.

They call it Just Culture.

The basic idea is simple: separate the behavior from the outcome.

Did someone make an honest mistake inside a bad system?

Console them. Fix the system.

Did someone take a shortcut because the risk felt small?

Coach them. Remove the incentive for the shortcut.

Did someone knowingly ignore a clear, serious, unjustifiable risk?

Punish them.

Pilot shows up drunk? Gone.

Employee lies about a known issue? Gone.

Someone fat-fingers a field in a process with no second set of eyes? That’s not the same thing.

Notice what’s missing from the framework:

“Did the plane crash?”

That’s the point.

The NTSB doesn’t only care about disasters!

They care about near misses. Because near misses are where the signal is. If you only learn when something explodes, your business is going to need a lot of explosions.

This has a name too: severity bias.

We judge behavior more harshly when the outcome is bad.

Same action. Different result. Totally different emotional reaction.

Small businesses are especially bad at this.

The sales rep who closes the big deal is a genius!!!

The rep who loses the big deal is suddenly on thin ice.

But did the first rep close because they were skilled, or because the prospect was already sold?

Did the second rep lose because they botched it, or because the deal was never winnable?

You probably don’t know.

And you, the owner/operator/leader, slowly build a completely fake model of what is actually working inside your company.

I wrote a newsletter last year about how “be more careful” is the worst feedback in the world.

I didn’t have the language for it then.

Now I do.

“Be more careful” treats a system problem like a motivation problem.

It assumes the person didn’t care enough. It skips the better questions.

• What was pulling their attention?

• What was unclear?

• What process allowed this to happen?

• Where should the second set of eyes have been?

• What did the system make easy?

• What did it make hard?

That’s the move.

Stop asking:

Who did this?

Start asking:

How did this happen?

Because people operate inside systems. Incentives. Slack chaos. unclear ownership. half-built processes. Weird tribal knowledge living in Steve’s head from 2019.

All the normal SMB nonsense.

So the next time something goes wrong, ask one question before you react:

Was this a bad decision or a bad outcome?

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

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