What actually happened, and what did I contribute?

A guided 18 to 22 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. A post-mortem that separates the decision from the outcome. It does not require you to be grateful for any of it.

A man in his late thirties reading a page over a table of paperwork in a half cleared industrial unit

Was the decision wrong, or only the outcome?

Those need different responses, and most people only ever apply one.

There is usually one specific thing. It is rarely the market.

What you'll look at

01The objective
02The sequence
03What you knew then
04The cost

A note from Mark

I have started things that worked and things that did not. Some of the ones that did not were badly judged. Some of them were reasonable decisions that met a market or a moment that had moved.

I do not think every failure needs to become an inspirational story. Some of them were expensive and I would rather have the money and the year back.

What I do find useful is separating the decision from the result. If you judge yourself on outcomes, you will learn the wrong lesson roughly half the time. You will also become cautious about things that were never the problem.

Read my full view ↓

The other half of that is being honest about the thing you actually got wrong. Usually there is one. It tends to be specific and slightly embarrassing, and people would rather blame the market, which is comfortable and teaches you nothing.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

01
The objective
02
What was known
03
Decision or outcome
04
The specific error
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓

01What you were trying to do
02What happened
03What you knew at the time
04The decisions you controlled
05What was outside your control
06What you got wrong
07What it cost
08The rival reading
09What deserves protecting
10What remains unresolved
11What you would do differently

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

Session
Date
The part of life this belongs to
What we found
The alternative we tested
What deserves protecting
What should change, if anything
Next actions
What to notice or find out
What remains unresolved

Open My Tree

What now?

01 · Save it
The objective, plainly stated.
02 · Test it
Write the sequence out, with dates, before you interpret any of it.

See more ↓

What I would do

01
Write the sequence before writing the verdict.
02
Judge each decision against what you knew then.
03
Name the specific thing you got wrong rather than blaming everything.
04
Be equally strict about what was not yours.
05
Turn the finding into a rule for next time, not a regret.

Test it

01
What did you know at the point you decided?
02
Would the same decision have been reasonable then?
03
What specifically did you get wrong?

The alternative

There are two ways this usually goes wrong, and they look nothing like each other. The result was bad while the decision was entirely reasonable given what you knew, and you are punishing yourself for information you did not have. Or the circumstances are being asked to carry more blame than they deserve, and there is a specific thing you got wrong that keeps being described in general terms.

Think about this

What you were actually trying to achieve, at the start.
What you knew at the point of each decision.
Which decisions were genuinely yours.
What it cost, including to other people.
Whether the decision was wrong or the outcome was.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Want to go further?

TRY · 12 MIN

Failure Post-Mortem

TAIU

What happened, what was decided and what was only visible afterwards.

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Right Kind of Wrong

Amy Edmondson

Separates preventable failure, complex failure and genuinely exploratory failure, and shows why each warrants a different response. The categories are cleaner in hindsight than in the moment, which is worth remembering while reading.

Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses

Sim Sitkin

Argues that small, survivable failures teach far more than large ones. Written about organisations, but the point about scale and recoverability holds for anybody deciding what to try next.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A woman in her late twenties outside the doors of an unfamiliar workplace on a grey morning

Next tool

What am I doubting?

If the aftermath is affecting your judgement of yourself

Continue →

Further thinking

How to Decide
Annie Duke
Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses
Sim Sitkin
Right Kind of Wrong
Amy Edmondson

See the thinking ↓

Book

How to Decide

Annie Duke

Former professional poker player Annie Duke has spent years studying decisions under uncertainty. One of her most useful ideas is simple: don't judge the quality of a decision solely by what happened afterwards. A strong decision can produce a bad result. A weak decision can get lucky.

Article