Critique Your Decision-Making Process After a Bad Outcome

Not all bad decisions reflect bad decision-making. Sometimes good processes produce bad outcomes because information was unavailable, uncertain, or deceptive. Treating every bad outcome as a failure of judgement produces excessive caution or the wrong corrections. This separates the process from the outcome so you know what to actually change.

I made a decision that did not work out and I want to critique the process I used rather than just the outcome, so I can make better decisions in the future.

The decision: [describe what you decided and in what context]
The information I had at the time: [describe what you knew and what you did not know]
How I made the decision: [describe your process, for example how long you thought about it, who you consulted, and what alternatives you considered]
The outcome and what I now know: [describe what happened and any information that emerged afterwards]

Distinguish between: where my decision-making process was flawed (I should have known or done better given the information available), and where the outcome was bad due to factors I could not have reasonably anticipated. Tell me one specific thing to do differently in my decision process next time, not a general improvement but a specific change.