The intelligence agents who anticipated the attack on the Twin Towers were not praised for their prescience, and the risk managers who warned banks of impending nemesis were fired. It is good for reputation to succeed against the odds. But it is often better for reputation to fail against the odds than to improve them. In an uncertain situation the effect of improving the odds is never obvious, either before the event or after it.

Captain MacWhirr, limited man though he was, understood that dilemma. Machiavelli, the epitome of the oblique decision maker, was the archetypal fox. Five centuries before Tetlock confirmed it empirically, Machiavelli understood that to be an effective decision maker it was wise not to seek public credit for the success of your decisions. Yet another of obliquity’s many paradoxes.

Numerous studies show that we process negative and positive information differently. You might say we’re saddled with a “negativity bias.” We take in “bad” information, including small mistakes and failures, more readily than “good” information. We have more trouble letting go of bad compared to good thoughts. We remember the negative things that happen to us more vividly and for longer than we do the positive ones. We pay more attention to negative than positive feedback. People interpret negative facial expressions more quickly than positive ones. Bad, simply put, is stronger than good. This is not to say we agree with or value it more but rather that we notice it more.

When presented with the choice between admitting our mistakes or protecting our self-image, the decision is easy. We want to believe we are not at fault, so we find every reason to justify what we did as correct. That makes it hard to learn! A psychological bias known as the fundamental attribution error exacerbates the problem. Stanford psychologist Lee Ross identified this fascinating asymmetry: when we see others fail, we spontaneously view their character or ability as the cause. It’s almost amusing to realize that we do exactly the opposite in explaining our own failures—spontaneously seeing external factors as the cause. For example, if we show up late for a meeting, we blame traffic. If a colleague is late for a meeting, we may conclude he is uncommitted or lazy.

To help overcome this ubiquitous tendency, best practices for RRTs included a list of early warning signals nurses could consult to legitimize their calls. This list helped nurses build on their vague hunch—because they’d simply be following the protocol. When the RRT showed up, it brought more trained eyes to the bedside to assess whether the patient was failing.

This is more than vigilance. When people are given permission to amplify and assess weak signals (such as with an Andon Cord or a rapid response team), they are invited to engage wholeheartedly in the work—to embrace its inherently uncertain nature, to believe that their own eyes and ears and brains matter.

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.