In creating strategy, it is often important to take on the viewpoints of others, seeing how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer. Advice to do this is both often given and taken. Yet this advice skips over what is possibly the most useful shift in viewpoint: thinking about your own thinking.

There are lots of safeguard strategies, though. My favourites include prevention, creating rules for yourself, making checklists, shifting your frame of reference, and making the invisible visible.

Safeguard Strategy 4: Putting in Guardrails

When the other person is done answering that first question, my friend still doesn’t offer his own thoughts right away. He first asks a follow up: “What else did I miss?”

This approach to interpersonal communication is an example of a reference-shifting safeguard. Asking the two questions, and listening to the answers people gave him, forces him to see things through other people’s eyes. Taking the time to do that protects him against a tendency that he identified as a weakness.

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.