Safi Bahcall, in an interview, talks about how Garry Kasparov’s success could be attributed to his post-game analysis technique. After a game, rather than looking at a bad move and trying to correct it, he would analyze how he arrived at that decision and what could be improved with his decision making process. This requires a shift from having an outcome mindset to a system mindset.

Instead of analyzing the outcome, going one step above and looking at the meta-level, which is the decision making process. The advantage with this approach is that once you adjust your process, it applies to other situations as well, not just one particular case that failed before.

In business life, this would mean, after a product launch that didn’t go well, instead of just looking at why the product failed, going one step further, and asking questions like “How did we arrive at the decision to launch that product at that time?”, “Who was involved in that decision?”, “Did they have the right information?”, “What were people’s individual incentives?”, “How were they communicating?” etc. It’s also important to analyze good outcomes, because it could be due to pure luck or despite a bad decision making process.

The system mindset really reasonated with me and I’m excited to use it in my life!