Every SME owner has made a call that turned out badly despite being the right decision at the time, and a call that worked out despite being reckless.
Confusing the two is one of the quietest ways good judgement erodes in a growing business. There’s a surprisingly clean illustration of this problem in, of all places, a simple card game. In FreeCell Solitaire, the overwhelming majority of deals are mathematically solvable — so a loss is rarely bad luck and almost always a process failure. That distinction between outcome and process is worth borrowing for any business that makes decisions under uncertainty, which is to say every business.
The Trap of “Resulting”
Poker players have a word for the mistake of judging a decision purely by how it turned out: resulting. It’s an easy trap to fall into, because outcomes are visible and immediate, while the quality of the reasoning behind a decision is much harder to inspect after the fact. A leadership team that hires a strong candidate who later underperforms, or backs a sound pricing strategy that gets undercut by an unforeseen competitor move, can end up punishing good process because the scoreboard says “loss.”
The trouble compounds over time. Teams that get rewarded and punished purely on outcomes learn, quite rationally, to optimise for outcomes rather than sound reasoning — which often means avoiding well-judged risks and gravitating toward safe, low-variance choices that look better on a quarterly report but compound worse over years.
This isn’t just a psychological quirk to note and move past. It shapes real incentive structures inside a business. A sales director who gets criticised for a well-reasoned bet that didn’t land, while a colleague gets praised for a reckless call that happened to pay off, is watching the organisation teach the wrong lesson in real time. Left uncorrected, that dynamic quietly trains a team to prefer comfortable mediocrity over calculated risk.
Why FreeCell Makes the Point So Cleanly
Most games that involve cards or dice let players blame the shuffle when things go wrong, and plenty of business decisions get the same excuse: market conditions, timing, forces beyond anyone’s control. FreeCell removes that excuse almost entirely. The entire board is dealt face-up from the first move, and independent analysis of the game’s standard deals has found that well over 99% are winnable with correct play. Only a small handful of deals have ever been confirmed unsolvable.
That means a lost game of FreeCell is close to a controlled experiment in decision quality. The deal wasn’t the obstacle; the sequence of choices was. It’s a rare case where the gap between “bad outcome” and “bad process” nearly disappears, because the puzzle was solvable and the player simply didn’t find the solution. Business decisions are messier and rarely offer that kind of clarity, but the underlying question is identical: was this a good decision that ran into bad variance, or a decision that deserved to fail?
Building the Distinction Into How a Team Reviews Decisions
A few practical habits help separate process quality from outcome quality when reviewing how a business decision played out:
Write the reasoning down before the outcome is known: A brief note on why a decision was made, made before the result comes in, is the only reliable way to later judge process rather than hindsight.
Ask what information was available at the time: Judging a past decision against information that only emerged afterward is judging a different decision than the one that was actually made.
Separate “wrong call” from “bad luck” explicitly: Teams that build this distinction into post-mortems tend to make better decisions over time, because they’re rewarding the right behaviour rather than the right dice roll.
Revisit losing decisions the same way you’d revisit winning ones: A good process that happened to lose deserves the same scrutiny, and often the same praise, as a good process that happened to win.
None of this eliminates bad luck from business, and it shouldn’t try to. It simply stops bad luck from being mistaken for bad judgement, or good luck from being mistaken for skill.
The Takeaway for Growing Businesses
Uncertainty isn’t a flaw in decision-making; it’s the entire environment decisions get made in, whether the stakes are a card game or a hiring choice. The businesses that improve fastest tend to be the ones that get comfortable evaluating the reasoning behind a call independently of how it turned out, rather than treating every result as a verdict on the decision itself. FreeCell happens to make that lesson unusually visible, because it strips away nearly every excuse. Most business decisions won’t offer that clarity. The discipline of asking the question anyway is what separates teams that genuinely improve from teams that just get lucky or unlucky on repeat.
