When the Result Isn’t the One We Wanted

When the result becomes the judge

When to plant. When to harvest. When to intervene. When to wait. What to feed. Which animal to breed. Which one to treat. Where to spend money. When to change something—and when to stay the course.

We make the best decision we can, and then biology, weather, people, markets and plain old chance get their say.

There is a term from decision psychology called resulting. It means judging the quality of a decision by the outcome it produced.

Good result = good decision. Bad result = bad decision.

But that’s not always true. Sometimes a very good decision ends badly. Sometimes a poor decision works out just fine.

If we judge ourselves only by the result, we can actually learn the wrong lesson from both.

Stack the deck

I’ve always liked the idea of trying to stack the deck in our favour.

That’s really what good farming—and good veterinary medicine—is about.

• Gather information
• Build good systems
• Prepare
• Pay attention
• Use experience
• Ask for advice
• Make the best decision we can with what we know

We’re trying to improve the odds. We don’t control the cards.

That’s an important distinction, because there are two traps when something goes wrong.

We can dismiss it as bad luck and learn nothing. Or we can assume the bad outcome means the entire process was wrong and change something that didn’t need changing.

Somewhere between those two is where learning happens.

I’ve been thinking about this while mentoring Clara as she starts her veterinary career, and while working with younger farmers beginning to make more of the decisions on their farms as the farm changes hands.

When you care about being good at something, it’s hard not to take a poor outcome personally.

Maybe experience isn’t learning how to avoid those outcomes altogether. Maybe it’s learning how to look at them honestly, take what they can teach us, and make the next decision a little better.

Four questions I find worth asking

When something doesn’t turn out the way we hoped, I think there are four questions that can help:

1. What did we know?

Go back to the moment the decision was made.

What information did we actually have?

Hindsight makes yesterday’s clues look obvious. Judge the decision using what you knew then, not what you know now.

2. Was the process sound?

Forget the outcome for a moment.

Given what we knew, was the decision reasonable?

Would we make the same decision again with the same information?

If not, we’ve found something to learn from. If yes, don’t abandon a good process simply because it produced one bad result.

3. What should we change?

Did the outcome reveal something we can actually improve?

If so, change it.

If not, resist changing something simply because doing something feels better than accepting uncertainty.

The point of reflection is to improve the next decision, not undo the last one.

4. Is this a result—or a pattern?

One result deserves our attention. A pattern deserves action.

That’s why records and data matter. Memory has a way of making the most painful or recent outcome feel more common than it actually is.

• One result: reflect.
• A pattern: investigate.
• A problem we can control: change it.

Carry the lesson, not the weight

Maybe that’s the balance we’re looking for.

Care enough about poor outcomes to examine them. Be humble enough to admit when our process needs to change. But be confident enough to trust a good process when it doesn’t.

Because farming will always give us another decision to make. We won’t know exactly how that one turns out either.

Our job isn’t to guarantee the outcome. It’s to keep improving the process that shapes the odds.

What did we know? Was the process sound? What should we change? Is this a result—or a pattern?

Then carry the lesson—not the weight—into the next one.