It’s good practice to codify your vision on paper. Writing it down forces you to think rigorously about what exactly you are trying to do. Even more important, it’s a critical step in making it the organization’s vision, rather than the vision of a single leader.

Tip: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.

It’s natural to think these abstractions will save us time and improve our decision-making, but in many cases they don’t. Reading a summary might be faster than reading a full document, but it misses a lot of details— details that weren’t relevant to the person summarizing the information, but that might be relevant to you. You end up saving time at the cost of missing important information. Skimming inadvertently creates blind spots.

Information is food for the mind. What you put in today shapes your solutions tomorrow. And just as you are responsible for the food that goes into your mouth, you are responsible for the information that goes into your mind. You can't be healthy if you feed yourself junk food every day, and you can't make good decisions if you’re consuming low-quality information. Higher quality inputs lead to higher quality outputs.

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.

Writing down your thoughts offers several benefits. One benefit is that a written record provides information about your thought process at the time you made the decision. It makes the invisible visible. Later, when you reflect on your decision, having that record is helpful for counteracting the distorting effects of the ego default. You can truthfully answer questions like, “What did I know at the time I made the decision?” And, “Did the things I anticipated happening come about for the reasons I thought they would?”

A second benefit of recording your thoughts is that in the process if writing something, you often realize you don’t really understand it as well as you thought you did.