A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, “participants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.

Because the presenters knew their material forward and back, they experienced what social psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”—the cognitive bias that makes it difficult for them to remember what it’s like to be a beginner seeing the content for the first time. That’s why they assumed the room could quickly grasp all the salient points as they flipped from slide to slide.

But if the goal of the meeting is to make decisions or give feedback, it can be tough for stakeholders to understand the material well enough in the span of a single meeting to arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance. This meant that I could spend as much time as I needed to understand all the charts and graphs, which allowed me to be a better contributor in the meeting.

In retrospect, the erosion seen in the engineer’s Champlain Towers South inspection seems a clear signal of imminent collapse—but at the time it was undeniably ambiguous. Ambiguous threats are problematic because of the natural human tendency to downplay them. It’s natural, and more pleasant, to assume nothing’s wrong and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Perhaps you’ve heard of confirmation bias-our tendency to see what we expect, thereby reinforcing an existing belief or prediction by paying attention to confirming data and failing to notice disconfirming data. Becoming more self-aware, as you will see in the next chapter, is one element of learning to notice early warnings—and to actively seeking disconfirming data, just in case. But it’s natural to adopt a wait-and-see attitude instead of getting curious and taking a closer look at some subtle signal of irregularity. The financial industry turned a collective blind eye to the risk of mortgage-backed securities, composed of shaky loans granted to people with neither assets nor income to ensure repayment.

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.

The best models will always fail at some point. CEOs must combine information with intuition in decision-making. They must deploy informed intuition. This is not simply going with one’s gut. A good definition of informed intuition is “the process of blending existing information and data with one’s experiences, educated assumptions, and instincts to arrive at a logical conclusion.” Relying on it is always important, but it becomes even more so in the second year, as you’re moving further out from the initial assessment of your strategic agenda. Informed intuition also requires taking the people component into account. Call it the social side of strategy: marrying the people and performance components. Numbers and analysis and logic only get you so far when you are in the fog of war.