The other night, I was watching the post-game show after the United States Men’s National Team played Turkey in the World Cup. The commentators were debating a controversial move by the coach: he sat nine of his 11 regular starters to rest them for the upcoming Round of 32 knockout match against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Predictably, the team looked disjointed on the field.

The announcer confidently declared, “Well, we’ll know in our next game against Bosnia whether or not the coach made the right decision.”

I couldn't disagree more.

We hear this kind of retrospective logic all the time. But the truth is, we don’t need to see the next game to know if the coach made the right decision. The quality of a decision has very little to do with its ultimate outcome. Instead, it has everything to do with the rigor of the process and the information known at the moment the trigger was pulled.

The Trap of Outcome Bias

The general public suffers from "outcome bias"—the habit of evaluating a choice based solely on how things turned out. But leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum of perfect foresight.

To be absolutely clear: outcomes do matter. I don't want to understate the value of results. A leader or a team that delivers poor outcomes over and over again is clearly missing the mark. And vice versa, just because a leader or team delivers desirable outcomes over and over, it could be luck as much as skill. But if outcomes are the only thing being measured, we are completely failing to fully evaluate the effectiveness of our leadership.

The late Colin Powell famously noted that if a leader can make a decision with 70% of the available information, they should consider it a luxury. In reality, most executives and managers are forced to move when they hit 50%.

As a former finance and operations executive, I spent my career acting as the guardian of the company’s balance sheet, P&L, and cash flow. My choices directly impacted corporate profitability and human careers, whether to develop and promote Person A or Person B, or where to allocate capital investment.

If you do your due diligence, thoughtfully research the risks, and project future likelihoods based on hard data, you have done your job. If an unpredictable black swan event blows up the result six months later, it doesn’t mean your decision was bad. It just means the future happened.

The Science of the "At-The-Time" Framework: A Dallas Mavericks Case Study

Consider the Dallas Mavericks’ decision a few years ago to allow point guard Jalen Brunson to walk in free agency. He went to the New York Knicks and eventually won an NBA Championship. Today, armchair critics look back and call it a massive blunder.

But let’s look at the actual science and data the Mavericks had at the time:

• They had already decided to build their future around Luka Dončić.
• Historical NBA data shows that it is incredibly rare for a primary star under 6'2" to lead a team to a championship.
• Since 1970, that elite club basically consists of Isiah Thomas, Allen Iverson, and Steph Curry.
• The vast majority of sustainable championship MVPs are 6'6" or taller (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Nikola Jokic).

Based on historical probability and the known information at the time, prioritizing Dončić and letting a shorter guard walk was a sound, scientifically backed decision. The fact that Brunson pulled off a shocking, historic run later doesn't invalidate the wisdom of the Mavericks' original choice.

A Leader’s Playbook: Speed vs. Accuracy

To avoid getting paralyzed by trying to predict an unpredictable future, effective decision-making requires a systematic approach. It starts by categorizing choices based on impact, risk, and complexity:

• Minor Decisions: No one will care or remember next week. They are easy to fix and recover from. Action: Delegate these immediately to preserve your mental bandwidth.
• Mid-Level Decisions: The number of affected people or departments is manageable, and the risk is contained. Action: Balance speed and accuracy; don't over-analyze.
• Major Decisions: High reputational risk, multiple stakeholders involved, and a long recovery time if things go sideways. Action: Take the time to triangulate data, but accept that you will never reach 100% certainty.

Tracking the "Parallel Universe"

True thought leadership in decision-making requires discipline, and that means tracking your choices through a dual lens. Every organization must track two equally important paths:

1. The Decision to Proceed: Moving forward with a project, hire, or investment, always bound by clear conditions and timelines.
2. The Decision Not to Proceed: Choosing to say "No" or "Not yet."

The Leadership Blindspot: Most companies only track the outcomes of the projects they launched. They rarely audit the outcomes of the ideas they killed or delayed.

To build a high-performing culture, we must use data and technology to track both universes. We need to measure our approach, our process methodology, and the resources consumed, not just the final revenue numbers.

Interrogating the Process: The Science and the Art

To fully evaluate a leader, we have to look past the scoreboard and actively interrogate the decision-making engine itself. This process is made up of two distinct pieces: the science and the art.

1. The Science (The Known & Projected)

The scientific part of the house is grounded in data. First, it's looking at what we already know today, the tangible metrics, history, and information we can get our hands around. Second, it involves forward-looking projections. These are the calculated assumptions we make about the future marketplace, macroeconomic trends, competitor movements, and customer behavior.

2. The Art (Navigating the Unknown)

The art of decision-making lives entirely in the gaps left by the unknown. At the end of the day, data can only take you so far. The art is a leader's intuition, the confidence in their own decision-making engine to look at a foggy horizon and definitively choose whether to go left or go right.

Experienced leaders know how to step back and properly judge this mix of science and art. When evaluating their management teams, they don’t just ask, "Did this make money?" 

They ask the hard questions to see how the conclusion was actually reached:

• What specific data led us to this decision?
• Where did we source that information, and did we contact the right people?
• How much of the baseline strategy was verifiable fact, and how much was assumed opinion?
• Did the team give the decision enough time, or did they take too much time and stall momentum?

Striking the Balance

Ultimately, great leadership requires the stomach to make choices today while forecasting what will be relevant 6, 12, or 24 months down the road.

If we only evaluate our leaders based on outcomes, we encourage timidity. We breed a culture of managers who are terrified to take calculated risks because they fear the sting of retrospective criticism.

High-quality leadership is about evaluating both the final results and the structural process used to get there. The next time you evaluate a major choice, whether it's a corporate restructuring or a World Cup starting lineup, stop looking strictly at the scoreboard. Look at the playbook used to make the call. That is where true leadership lives.

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