Project management: does a good outcome prove a good decision?
In Zurich’s financial services, insurance, technology businesses and European headquarters of international groups, project decisions are made with incomplete information. How can a manager assess their quality without allowing the final outcome to rewrite what it was reasonable to decide?
What the literature establishes
Jonathan Baron and John C. Hershey (1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) demonstrate experimentally that knowing 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 therefore leads to a more favourable assessment of the preceding decision. For project management, this suggests distinguishing the soundness of a decision from the success observed afterwards.
Accountability is not enough: what people account for matters
Jennifer S. Lerner and Philip E. Tetlock (1999, Psychological Bulletin) establish in a literature review that the effects of accountability depend, among other things, on its timing and the audience to whom people must justify themselves. Accountability therefore does not automatically reduce bias and can, under certain conditions, encourage defensive justification. Asking for an explanation of options and uncertainties before a decision is a different exercise from asking afterwards why the outcome was unsatisfactory.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that evaluation should focus exclusively on the process and disregard outcomes. That would go too far: outcomes remain essential for assessing a project’s consequences and revising its underlying assumptions. The distinction is between two questions: was the decision defensible given the information available, and what can we learn from its outcome? (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot guarantee
Experiments on outcome bias do not reproduce the full complexity of a Zurich project portfolio, and the accountability review does not test a single project governance arrangement. These studies therefore do not prove that a decision record alone improves performance. In practice, a justification written after delivery may also reconstruct the reasoning rather than document what actually guided the choice.
A practical check in Zurich
One possible application within SHR’s “Project Management” programme is a four-week trial of a record dated before each decision selected for the exercise, documenting options, available information, uncertainties and the rationale for the choice. In a Zurich bank, insurer, technology business or European headquarters, an evaluator then assesses these anonymised records against predefined criteria, first without knowing the outcome and then after it is disclosed. The measure is the proportion of decisions whose assessment changes between the two readings, out of all decisions reviewed. This difference is a signal for discussion, not automatic proof of bias: reviewers must check whether the outcome provides relevant information or merely changes their judgement of an already documented choice. To go further: explore the Project Management training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Project Management in Zurich
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