Fooled by Experience: What you Think You've Learned May be Wrong. A Guide to Figuring out the Real Lessons

Experience is often assessed through multiple filters that restrict the ability to view the reality of the situation, and thereby cause individuals to make poor decisions. A positive outcome can lead to the adherence to a questionable strategy, and a negative one can cause one to drop a strategy that may still be useful. Guidelines for clearly assessing the situation include studying failures, conducting postmortems, promoting uncensored input and feedback, actively looking for disconfirming evidence, seeking out issues that would hinder the mission, acknowledging the role of chance, and imagining a variety of possible scenarios.