Decision context
Use these evidence-reviewed lenses when a team is choosing a direction, interpreting results, deciding whether to continue, or turning metrics into action.
Use this context when
Evidence-reviewed lenses
What evidence would make us abandon or materially change the preferred explanation?
Confirmation bias is an umbrella label for several ways existing beliefs or hypotheses can influence information search and interpretation. It should not be reduced to one behaviour such as reading only agreeable news, and a preference for confirming tests is not irrational in every task or environment.
Would we rate this decision process the same way if the outcome had gone the other direction?
Outcome bias occurs when knowledge of a result changes how people evaluate the quality of a decision even when the information available at the time of the decision is held constant. Outcomes can still be relevant for learning, so the error is not 'never look at results'; it is using luck or hindsight as if it had been available to the original decision-maker.
What did our actual pre-outcome forecast or notes say before the result became obvious?
Knowing an outcome can make the outcome look more predictable in retrospect. The effect has been studied for decades and across many settings, but it does not mean that every confident explanation after an event is biased.
Would we assign the same blame or praise if the decision-maker had the same intent, beliefs, and controllable risk but luck produced a different outcome?
Resultant moral luck describes cases where judgments of blame, punishment, or moral evaluation differ because otherwise similar actions lead to different outcomes partly outside the agent's control. Outcome information does affect moral judgment in experiments, but the effect should not be reduced to 'people ignore intent.' Mental states, causal responsibility, belief justification, negligence, and the kind of moral judgment being asked about all matter. Some studies find that false or unjustified beliefs explain more of classic moral-luck asymmetries than the bad outcome itself, while still detecting an independent outcome effect.
If we had not already invested anything, would we still fund the next step on its future merits?
Sunk-cost effects and escalation of commitment overlap but are not interchangeable. Sunk-cost research asks whether irrecoverable prior investments influence current choices. Escalation of commitment describes persistence or additional resource allocation to a failing course of action and can also be driven by personal responsibility, self-justification, project structure, and other factors.
What underlying goal is this metric supposed to represent, and where can the proxy diverge from it?
Surrogation is a domain-specific management-accounting construct: a measure that was designed to represent a strategic objective can start to be treated as though it were the objective itself. It is closely related to metric fixation and proxy problems, but those broader labels should not be treated as exact synonyms without checking the setting and mechanism.
Decision workflow
Freeze the information set: what did the team actually know before the latest outcome?
Separate decision-process quality from whether the result happened to be good or bad.
When blame or praise enters the review, separate intention, reasonable belief, controllable risk, causal responsibility, and the eventual outcome.
Write the next increment of cost and expected value without counting already-spent resources as a future benefit.
Name the strategic goal behind each important metric and one way the metric could improve while the goal gets worse.
Specify what evidence would change the preferred plan before gathering another round of supporting evidence.
Practice this context
