How do you actually learn from the decisions you make as a leader?

I've noticed that we tend to remember leadership decisions based on their outcomes. If something worked, we remember why it was a good idea. If it failed, we remember what we should have seen coming.

But that's not necessarily what we actually thought at the time.

What evidence did we have? What alternatives did we consider? How confident were we? What assumptions were we making? What did we think was most likely to go wrong?

That's why I included a Decision Log in my new book, Decision Intelligence: Why Evidence Fails and How Leaders Win the Room. The idea is to capture your reasoning before you know the outcome, then come back later and compare what you believed with what actually happened.

The goal isn't to beat yourself up over decisions that didn't work. It's to separate a bad decision from a bad outcome, and learn from both.

I turned the template into a free PDF that can be used for personal or professional decisions:

https://www.thenicholasjohnson.com/downloads/decision-intelligence-decision-log.pdf

I'd love to hear from other leaders: Do you have a way of looking back at important decisions you've made? What have you actually learned from doing it?