Perspectives for Postmortems
You know the feeling: that sickening sense of vertigo, the sound of your pulse loud in your ears, the world around you faded down into the background.
You’ve arrived home to find all your belongings outside the front door, along with a note.
You just got a phone call from the board of directors asking to see you in person immediately, with no other details.
Half of your staff just quit today.
It’s the biggest sales day of the year…and everything looks flat.
Ughhhhh.
The system you’re in has failed, and you just fell on your face.
How would you have known earlier?
It’s an absolutely crucial question, so you can learn from this and prevent its happening in the future.
It’s also an unfair question: in hindsight, catastrophic failures typically have an I Should Have Known feeling to them, and often one or more moments or decisions that you look back on and kick yourself for—but may well have been reasonable at the time given what you knew and believed then. Conversely, looking at what happened can be so painful that you can fall into unconsciously blaming it all on things and people outside your control.
So how, then, to unpack this in retrospect and learn what’s valuable, rather than biasing yourself into unneeded pain and worse decisions in the future?
One approach is to take yourself out of it. Imagine that whatever’s occurred happened instead to a close and respected friend of yours with whom you have an open, honest rapport—and that they’ve asked your advice. Ask them to describe the choices they made and why they made them at the time, the details of what went on. Advise them as you would such a friend—gently, honestly, and keeping a firm grasp on the reality that there’s always a blend of contributions between personal choices, the surrounding environment, and the uncertainty of sheer luck.
Hindsight isn’t 20/20: it’s easy to be too close to the events to see them clearly. With a little emotional distance and a lot of honesty, though, you can turn today’s face-plant into tomorrow’s graceful leap.
