A couple of years ago, I heard an idea on a podcast that has slowly but surely become one of the more useful tools I use for evaluating the long-term success of important decisions. Unlike yesterday’s index card, this one wasn’t about reflection or gratitude. It came from the world of personal finance.
The recommendation was deceptively straightforward. Whenever a significant decision is made, go through the disciplined exercise of recording the course of action, why it was selected, and what was expected to be the result. This isn’t a lengthy or elaborate endeavor. Rather, the point is to preserve your thinking before the rationale is forgotten or the future has a chance to rewrite it.
At first glance, that may sound like little more than keeping notes. In reality, it is something much more valuable. It captures the assumptions behind the decision while they are still fresh. Months or years later, when you look back at what actually happened, you have an objective record of what you believed at the time rather than what you now remember believing.
That also changes how we evaluate the decision itself. For example, if we took a position in a particular fund or stock that loses money, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a poor decision. If the assumptions were reasonable, the risks were understood, and the choice fit the objectives, it may have been an excellent decision that simply produced an unfavorable outcome. The opposite is equally true. A speculative investment that unexpectedly doubles in value isn’t automatically evidence of good judgment. Sometimes people are rewarded for taking risks they shouldn’t have taken in the first place.
This data collection exercise separates the quality of the decision from the quality of the outcome. It also provides an objective basis for recognizing when circumstances have changed. If the assumptions you originally wrote down are no longer true, that may be the signal that it’s time to revisit the decision. Rather than changing course because of emotion or impatience, you’re responding to evidence that the world no longer matches the conditions under which the decision was made.
That way of thinking feels remarkably familiar to me because it mirrors how engineers approach complex systems. Designs, implementation plans, and sustainment strategies are all built upon assumptions. When those assumptions prove incorrect, good engineers don’t stubbornly defend the original decision. They update their understanding of reality and adapt accordingly.
The same principle applies surprisingly well to tennis, although perhaps not in the middle of a match. There simply isn’t time to stop after every point and document why you served down the T instead of out wide. Tennis is too fast for that.
The real opportunity lies in the larger decisions we make about our development as players. Those choices frequently represent long-term investments of time, money, and effort. The results often take months to materialize.
Writing down the rationale behind decisions creates an objective record that is remarkably useful months later. Why did you make the change? What were you hoping to accomplish? What assumptions did you make? More importantly, what evidence would convince you that the decision was working, or that it was time to change course? Rather than relying on memory, you have something much more reliable to evaluate whether your original reasoning still holds.
The concept is even more valuable for organizations than it is for individuals. Every significant change on the institutional side of tennis begins with a decision. When that happens, the people who selected the course of action (hopefully) did so for some valid reason. The assumptions about the problem the decision was intended to address, the desired outcomes, and how success will ultimately be measured should be systematically recorded.
Unfortunately, those assumptions are rarely preserved in a way that allows them to be revisited later. Years afterward, everyone will be aware of what changed, but far fewer people will remember why it changed or what the organization expected would happen as a result.
Imagine how much healthier those discussions would become if every significant policy decision included a brief decision record: Here is the problem we believe exists. Here are the alternatives we considered. Here is why we selected this approach. Here is how we will know whether it worked.
That transforms governance from opinion to evidence. Rather than debating whether a policy feels successful, organizations can revisit the assumptions that justified the decision in the first place and ask much more meaningful questions: Were our assumptions correct? If we knew then what we know now, would we have done something differently? If the answer to either is “yes,” an additional question comes into play: “Then why not do something differently now?”
Looking back, I suspect that is the real value of a decision record. It isn’t simply a productivity tool but rather a mechanism for improving judgment. Whether the decision involves an investment portfolio, an engineering program, a tennis development plan, or the governance of an entire sport, preserving the rationale makes it easier to recognize when our assumptions were sound, when they were flawed, and when the world changed enough to justify a different path.
Good decisions do not guarantee good outcomes, and poor decisions occasionally produce surprisingly good ones. The objective is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to make better decisions over time. That begins by remembering not just what we decided, but why we opted for it in the first place.
