In Sion, does a good outcome prove that a decision was sound?
A prudent decision can lead to a loss, while a poorly supported gamble can succeed. The management question is specific: how can we assess decision quality without confusing what was defensible at the outset with what eventually happened?
What the literature establishes
Jonathan Baron and John C. Hershey (1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) demonstrated experimentally that a decision’s outcome influences assessments of its quality, even when the information available at the time of the choice remains identical. A favourable outcome leads to more positive judgements of both the decision and the decision-maker. This outcome bias means that retrospective evaluation does not assess only the soundness of the original reasoning.
When outcomes rewrite what seemed predictable
Baruch Fischhoff (1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) showed that knowing an event’s outcome changes assessments of its predictability. Once the outcome is known, reconstructing the uncertainty that existed beforehand becomes difficult. This hindsight bias is distinct from outcome bias: it changes what we believe we could have predicted, not just how we judge the decision.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that only the process should be assessed and outcomes ignored. That would go too far: outcomes remain essential for testing assumptions and learning, but an isolated outcome cannot establish the quality of a choice. Two questions need to be distinguished: was the decision defensible given the available information, and what does its outcome teach us for the future? (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these experiments cannot establish
These studies use experimental situations and do not directly measure the magnitude of these biases in organisations in Sion. Nor do they demonstrate that an assessment rubric would be sufficient to eliminate them. In practice, reconstructing the original information retrospectively remains unreliable: a record written after the outcome is known may already contain a reordered narrative.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR’s “Decision-making” programme, an exercise could examine management decisions in Sion and its surrounding economic area: hydropower maintenance, hospital purchasing, vineyard investment or alpine tourism offerings. Before their outcomes are known, record the options, available information and reasons for each choice, then have separate evaluators assess these anonymised records using the same rubric, with or without access to the outcome. The measure would be the average difference in scores between the two conditions for the same records, with versions randomly assigned to evaluators. This difference would document how sensitive local assessments are to outcomes, without in itself proving that decisions have improved. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Sion
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