There is a well-known story of an Australian speed skater, Steven Bradbury. A good athlete, but, it’s fair to say, a rank outsider for taking a victory on the world stage.
After just making the semi-finals at the 2002 Winter Olympics, Steven advanced to the finals after three of his competitors were taken out by disqualification and a fall. He then famously took gold in dramatic fashion against a field packed with world-class competitors at the very top of their game, when, towards the end of the race, everyone but Steven went down, leaving him as the only man still standing.
If you were so inclined, you could attribute Stevens victory to superior strategy, a skilful appraisal of the race situation and masterful execution. But this would be inaccurate. The reality is, Steven was not as skilled and not as fit as his competitors. His victory was a product of luck.
This is an extreme and self-evident example, but organisations fall prey to this kind of ‘outcome fallacy’ all the time. Assuming that victory or defeat is the direct product of their strategy.
Oftentimes, I would argue every time, we should dissect and analyse our strategies after the fact.
In some instances, a case could be made that, when something big is missed, greater care should have been taken. That we should have looked in greater breadth or depth at the variables so as to not miss the piece of critical context that caused the approach to succeed or fail. That more hypothesis generation, testing and validation should have been performed.
Sometimes this will be the case.
But we must also recognise that there are, as in the examples above, ‘black swan’ events, things which are extremely difficult or impossible to predict which drastically affect the outcome. And which render any judgement of a strategies value difficult
The takeaway? Put measures in place to ensure you do not fall prey to either misplaced hubris or blame when looking at your outcomes. A strong and objective post-mortem could prevent you from repeatedly executing on a poor strategy that “worked once” and wondering why you are failing. Or conversely abandoning a winning formula because sheer bad luck meant it didn’t come to fruition the first time.