What if "ifs" were not
As we learn to look back and think what we could have done better, it's important to keep our goal in mind. The goal is to implement something new, not to get stuck on regrets and the past.
- We care most
- We trick ourselves
- Make it better
- agentic leadership
Hard truths
- We care most. More than anyone else will care to remember us, so we should not waste our time chastising ourselves for making the best decision we could at the time. Implement something today or tomorrow that will make our next decision a better one.
- We trick ourselves. We may think that the outcome would have been better. But really, we can't know. It's not worth our time to regret unknowns. Our brains are not rational in these moments. It may be professional or personal, but when we get surprised and disappointed by an outcome, our brains will rationalise that it could have worked. We simply can't know.
- Make it better. Things can always be better. Better is infinite: it is just based on resources, time, and opportunity cost. The way we make decisions is a skill we can work on all our lives, and we should always make it better. Some decisions may have better outcomes than others, but in the end they are decisions we made with the process we had at the time. Learn from them, and implement our own new skills to do better next time.
Better is infinite: it is just based on resources, time, and opportunity cost.
Why it is hard
Wanting to do better makes you look at the past, and it is a slippery slope toward the what-ifs: had we done this or that, would the outcome have been better?
What changed
Mental load reduced, useless conversations avoided, with a faster execution toward the next goal.
How AI agents can accelerate the process
At this point you may see what I am getting at. Our decision process is very similar to the process of AI agents, except that we make decisions alongside them and help them improve faster than we improve ourselves. We implement new rules, rituals, skills, loops and tools so that together we get more efficient.
Yet it's not only them that we teach, but also ourselves in how to be more efficient in our agentic leadership.
At this time I keep building on new rituals and deploy skills. I have two tools that we collaborate on, for product mapping, issue tracking, staging and deploy statuses, and briefs for new projects and features, while continuously tracking the feedback on what we run into and how to improve the process. I have to say, over these last few months we have increased our velocity and the speed of our decision-making at least tenfold.