Tool 89 · Develop yourself
For damage that is too concrete for an apology to cover. Money, property, credit, work, a decision that cost other people.
A guided 25 to 35 minute conversation, here in TAIU. You can also take it away and use it elsewhere.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Restitution comes before feelings.
Some damage cannot be undone. Say so rather than covering it.
What you'll explore
A note from Mark
I have made decisions that cost people their jobs. Some of them were the right decisions badly communicated, and one or two were simply wrong, and 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, and 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, which is exactly why it is worth more than the apology.
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
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 portable summary of everything the conversation established.
When you finish
This session works on you rather than one part of your life, so nothing is rated. At the end you are asked, once, which part of your life it touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this for you. Keep the sheet, print it, or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
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.
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
Put restitution first. If something can be given back, paid or corrected, that comes before any conversation about how you feel.
Apportion in both directions. Take your part precisely, and do not take the market's part or the board's.
Treat credit as property. Correcting a record in front of the same people who heard it wrong is a specific, available repair.
Separate a bad outcome from a bad decision, and a bad decision from wrongdoing.
Say plainly what cannot be undone rather than covering it with a gesture.
Test it
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.
Ask what you would say if the person affected were in the room. Then say that version.
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
Take this to Ask Mark
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →What helped you?
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Finished the exercise?
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Next tool
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
Book
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
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
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.