Decisions, outcomes, and learning from what didn’t go wrong

We learn from outcomes, yet outcomes are unreliable teachers. In critical care, decisions are made with incomplete information, under time pressure, within systems that normalize workarounds, and where causality is opaque [1]. The feedback we receive later, whether a patient survives or dies or the extent of their recovery, reflects more than the decision itself. Physiology, system redundancies, timely intervention by a colleague, stochastic variance: all shape outcomes independently of our reasoning [2]. If we treat outcomes as verdicts on decision quality, we will systematically mislearn. [More]