What Good Looks Like

Most of the decisions you are judged on, you will not be able to judge for a long time.

The hire. The vendor. The ERP platform. The restructure. You commit now, under today’s assumptions, and the results arrive much further down the timeline — long after the moment when changing course would have been cheap. By the time you can see whether the decision was good, the window to do much about it has usually closed.

This is one of the quiet problems of senior decision-making, and most executives never name it directly. So let me set it out plainly, in the order it actually unfolds.

1. The results come late — and late results are expensive to act on

When you make a significant decision, the feedback does not arrive on a convenient schedule. It arrives years later, often at the worst possible moment.

Choose an ERP platform in year one, and the truth about whether it fit your organisation surfaces at go-live in year two or three — when reversing the choice costs ten times what it would have cost to get right at the start. Hire a senior leader, and you will not know whether it was the right call until eighteen months of decisions have already compounded. By the time the result is visible, you are no longer choosing. You are living with a choice already made.

2. By the time results arrive, you have changed

This is the part that catches people out. It isn’t only the world that moves while you wait. You move too.

As time passes, our understanding shifts. Our priorities reorder. Our expectations rise or fall. The business reorganises around us. So when the results finally land, we judge the old decision through a new lens — one shaped by everything we have learned since we decided.

That is not a fair trial. It is a retrofit. The leader you hired for one mandate gets assessed against a mandate that has changed underneath them. The vendor you chose for one set of requirements gets blamed for failing requirements that didn’t exist when you signed. We tell ourselves we are evaluating the decision. We are actually evaluating it against a standard it was never given.

3. So “just keep reassessing” is not the answer

The instinct, once you see this, is to assess continuously — to keep re-checking every decision against current conditions. In practice this is impossible. You cannot re-litigate every major commitment against a world that shifts every quarter. There are too many decisions, and the ground moves too often. Continuous reassessment is not discipline. It is noise.

4. The answer is to fix the standard at the moment you decide

There is a simpler move, and it has to happen at the start, not the end.

When you make the decision, write down what good looks like. Set a baseline — your expectations and your expected outcomes — at two levels: the milestone level, and the final-goal level. Not a vague aspiration. A specific picture of what this decision is supposed to produce, captured while you still have the clarity of the moment you chose.

This is the unglamorous part, which is exactly why it gets skipped. At the start of anything, everyone is optimistic and no one wants to define what failure would look like. But that single paragraph, written before the results exist, is the only honest reference point you will have later.

5. Only then can you measure the truth instead of a story

With a baseline in hand, the picture changes entirely.

Now, when the results arrive, you can compare actuals to intent — not to whatever you happen to believe today. You can see direction, whether you are moving positively or negatively against what you set out to do. You can see drift, the slow distance opening up between where you are and where you said you’d be. And you can see the real quality of the decision you made, rather than the flattering or punishing story hindsight wants to tell.

Sit two steering committees side by side. One has a baseline; one does not. Both have a green status report in front of them. Only one of them can actually tell whether green is the truth — because only one of them wrote down, in advance, what green was supposed to mean.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The reason most of us cannot say whether our past decisions were good is not that the decisions were complicated. It is that we never recorded what we were aiming at — so we left our future selves to judge the past with eyes that had already changed.

The discipline costs almost nothing: a paragraph at the start, when no one wants to write it. The absence of it costs you the ability to ever know the truth.

So before your next significant decision — the platform, the hire, the restructure — the question is not whether it will turn out well. The question is whether you have written down what well would even look like. Because if you haven’t, you are not making a decision you can assess. You are making one you will only ever get to rationalise.