Coaching practices for How to Learn From Past Results

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Learn From Past Results, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• After things play out I always tell myself I "knew it all along," so I never actually learn whether my read on the ripple effects was right
• Whenever something I try doesn’t pan out, I find I can always tell myself "yeah, that’s roughly what I figured"
• When something flops, I notice how fast my mind starts spinning reasons it doesn’t really count
• When something goes badly I’ll pick it apart for hours, but when something actually goes great I just enjoy it and move on without a second thought
• I have these clear insights about what I should do differently, and then the moment passes and nothing changes

Practices that may help

1. Keep a second-order decision journal
   Record the downstream effects you predicted, then check them later.
   Second-Order Thinking: And Then What?
2. Form a testable prediction before you act
   State in advance what you expect to happen, so the result is evidence rather than noise.
   Plan–Do–Study–Act: Deming’s Loop for Personal Improvement
3. Study the gap between prediction and result with honesty
   Compare what you expected to what happened, and resist the urge to explain the gap away.
   Plan–Do–Study–Act: Deming’s Loop for Personal Improvement
4. Apply the AAR to successes, not only setbacks
   Reviewing what actually caused a win produces replicable insight; reviewing only failures produces only loss-avoidance.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
5. Plan a concrete experiment to test your new principle
   Close the loop by deciding specifically how you will apply the extracted lesson next time.
   Structured Reflection: Kolb’s Learning Cycle in Practice
6. Conduct post-project debriefs to contribute to the class data
   Record actual vs. forecast outcomes honestly — this builds the reference class that future forecasts depend on.
   Reference Class Forecasting
7. Treat forecasting accuracy as a skill that improves with practice
   Take prediction errors as performance feedback, not as proof that forecasting is futile.
   Superforecasting
8. Keep a written PDSA log so the cycle has memory
   Record each cycle so patterns across attempts are visible and the same mistake is not repeated indefinitely.
   Plan–Do–Study–Act: Deming’s Loop for Personal Improvement
9. Analyze your best days — not just your failures — to identify what drives success
   When performance is above target, investigate what made it so: replicating peaks is as important as preventing troughs.
   Feedback Loops and Behavior Change
10. Choose the right reference class for any prediction
    Find the statistical base rate for the category your decision belongs to — not just the inspiring examples.
    Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See

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