When a Decision Goes Wrong, Don’t Take It Back

Moving a decision away from yourself is only part of the work. The harder test comes when someone else makes that decision and the result is not what you expected. In this episode of Mind to Impact, Bill O’Connor examines what should happen after an imperfect decision. Rather than automatically taking the authority back, the better approach is to understand why the outcome occurred and correct the part of the decision structure that failed. Was an important boundary missing? Was the escalation point unclear? Did the person lack information? Was the standard too vague? Or was the issue actually one of judgment and capability? The goal is not to create an organization where mistakes never happen. It is to create one that can learn from mistakes without becoming dependent on the owner again. Because every time authority returns to you after something goes wrong, the organization learns that ownership is temporary and the real decision maker is still you.