Ask AltoTRY · 12 MIN
Failure Post-Mortem
TAIU
What happened, what was decided and what was only visible afterwards.
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Tool 89 · Develop yourself
I caused damage. What can I actually repair?
A guided 25 to 35 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. For damage that is too concrete for an apology to cover. Money, property, credit, work, a decision that cost other people.
What can actually be given back?
Restitution comes before feelings.
Some damage cannot be undone. Say so rather than covering it.
What you'll look at
- 01What happened
- 02What you knew at the time
- 03Who else decided
- 04What has already been done
A note from Mark
I have made decisions that cost people their jobs. Some of them were the right decisions, badly communicated. A few were simply wrong. I can still tell you which is which.
What I learned is that the useful question is almost never how bad a person this makes me. It is what is left that can be corrected. It is whether I am prepared to do the unglamorous parts of it.
Restitution is unglamorous. Paying something back, putting a name on a piece of work in front of the people who heard it wrong, telling somebody something that makes your position worse. None of it produces a moment of absolution. That is exactly why it is worth more than the apology.
Read my full view ↓
And some of it cannot be repaired. Somebody's two years, somebody's company. I do not think there is anything to do with that except carry it accurately and decide differently next time.
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
What the damage actually is
02
What is yours and what is not
03
What can be returned or corrected
04
What cannot be repaired
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What happened
- 03Who was affected
- 04What the damage actually is
- 05What is yours
- 06What is not yours
- 07What can be returned or corrected
- 08Who needs to know
- 09What cannot be repaired
- 10What accountability would look like from here
- 11The rival reading
- 12What deserves protecting
- 13The credible alternative
- 14What, if anything, should change
- 15What remains unresolved
- 16Where this goes next
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
What now?
01 · Save it
What the damage is in its own terms, rather than in the language of feelings.
02 · Test it
Write the list of everybody affected, then add the second row of people that first list leaves off.
See more ↓
Before you act on this
Where money, employment, contracts or regulation are involved, take proper advice. Taking advice is not evasion, and this page is not a substitute for it.
Where anybody is still at risk, or where what happened may be a criminal matter, that comes before any private repair.
What I would do
- 01
Put restitution first. If something can be given back, paid or corrected, that comes before any conversation about how you feel.
- 02
Apportion in both directions. Take your part precisely, and do not take the market's part or the board's.
- 03
Treat credit as property. Correcting a record in front of the same people who heard it wrong is a specific, available repair.
- 04
Separate a bad outcome from a bad decision, and a bad decision from wrongdoing.
- 05
Say plainly what cannot be undone rather than covering it with a gesture.
Test it
- 01
Ask whether the wording you are considering leaves somebody with a less accurate picture than they should have. If it does, it is not a disclosure.
- 02
Ask what you would say if the person affected were in the room. Then say that version.
- 03
Ask which decision you would make differently now, and what would make you notice it in time.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you were responsible and should make amends. Both halves can be more precise. Sometimes the decision was defensible on what you knew, and the thing that is actually yours is the six weeks of silence afterwards. Sometimes the repair is not to the person you have been thinking about but to somebody further out who lost more and has never been mentioned. Sometimes what can be returned is smaller than what should be corrected on a record. And occasionally the honest finding is that the damage is real, it is yours, and no restitution exists, which is a heavier answer than the one you came for.
Think about this
- What happened, in sequence, with dates where you have them.
- What you knew at the time, and what you found out afterwards.
- Who was affected, including the people one step further out.
- Whether anything can still be returned, corrected or put on the record.
- Who has not been told, and whether they are owed it.
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 →Put this into practice
Recommended by the TAIU community
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
The conversation I keep not having
If somebody has to be told
Further thinking
Right Kind of Wrong
Amy Edmondson
On Apology
Aaron Lazare
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
See the thinking ↓
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.
Book
On Apology
Aaron Lazare
Lazare, a psychiatrist who studied apology for decades, is precise about what an apology has to contain and about how often it is offered to relieve the person giving it. The distinction between acknowledging the harm and explaining yourself runs through the whole book and it is the distinction most people get wrong.
Article
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
The finding that matters here is not that people feel uncomfortable when belief and behaviour diverge. It is what they do about it. Adjusting the belief is far cheaper than adjusting the conduct, and it happens without anybody noticing. If you have quietly stopped believing something you used to act on, this explains the mechanism.