5 Steps for How to Intelligently Analyze a Failure

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We all have times when we underperform. When failures happen, most of us are highly motivated to perform better next time.

To do that, we need to intelligently understand what went wrong. However, some cognitive and emotional pitfalls are common when people attempt to accurately understand their failures. Here’s how to avoid controllable mistakes in your analysis so you can excel next time.

1. Allow yourself 24-48 hours to feel your feelings first.

Emotions like intense disappointment, shock, and panic aren’t conducive to flexible, long-term thinking. Attempting to engage in accurate thinking while feeling those emotions can do more harm than good. Knee-jerk defensiveness can harm relationships and your reputation and dig a bigger hole. Allow your emotions to subside first.

That said, if other people are Monday-morning quarterbacking immediately, occasionally, this period of emotional vulnerability can lead to useful insights. For example, someone might speak up about problems they foresaw but were too scared to mention, or they might say they didn’t think that sharing their view at an earlier, more helpful point was wanted. You can plan for how you’ll acquire dissenting insights earlier instead of after the fact.

2. Confine your analysis to targeted time slots.

In the weeks after a failure, it’s not helpful to think about what happened all day, every day, or for thoughts about it to frequently intrude on your other activities. That’s rumination. It doesn’t help you to think clearly or problem-solve.

Instead, dedicate particular time slots in your day to analyzing the failure. For example, perhaps you allow yourself to think about it from 9 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. each weekday. The rest of the day, if you have thoughts about the experience, you redirect your attention.

3. Keep an open mind about the consequences of failure.

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that a big, important failure (especially a public one) will have negative consequences for the trajectory of your life. That’s not always the case. There can be all sorts of outcomes, such as:

• A heavy loss prompts you to fix fundamental problems that a narrow win wouldn’t have instigated
• The failure has little impact
• The loss causes you to move on from a path you were less talented at to one that is a better fit

In reality, you can’t accurately predict the consequences of a failure, so ruminating about that often isn’t helpful or accurate.

4. Have a system for avoiding common reasoning failures.

Imagine you get 8th in a race you were expected to win. You expected the race to go out too fast, so you planned to hold back and then move through the pack. In reality, the race went out slowly at first, and your race plan didn’t prepare you for that.

In response, you might overfocus on not making that same mistake in the future but neglect to prepare for other scenarios. This is a common error known as “fighting the last war.”

You can use probing questions to avoid it. For example:

• “Imagine I lose my next race, but for entirely different reasons. What might those reasons be?”
• “If the start of the race had gone perfectly, what other factors might still have caused the loss?”
• “What would my strategy look like if I ignored this one factor entirely?”

This isn’t the only relevant common thinking mistake. Others you will need to avoid include confirmation bias, ego, emotional reaction, overgeneralization, loss aversion, fear of innovation, survivorship bias, short-term bias, groupthink, excessive focus on metrics, attribution errors, and the sunk-costs fallacy.

Develop a review plan that includes one or two questions to challenge each of these biases. For instance, the question “If my time or place wasn’t recorded, how would I evaluate my performance?” can help overcome an excessive focus on metrics (at the expense of other insights).

5. Try the “five whys” or similar backward reasoning techniques to understand your faulty assumptions.

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Let’s continue with the race scenario. If you identified that your faulty assumption was the race would go out too fast, why and when did you make that assumption? What was the assumption underlying that assumption?

Keep moving backward, asking yourself the same question again to identify important decision points and key faulty assumptions. Doing this will help you make plans for how not to make the same mistakes in the future.

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re analyzing a failure. Keep it simple and focus on the big rocks. Giving yourself compassion throughout the process will help your thinking stay flexible and nimble. Be visionary. Take care not to fall into the trap of fighting the last war.