“You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?” – Talking Heads

Wikipedia serves up a fascinating perspective on hindsight: “Hindsight bias is the inclination to see events that have occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place.” It’s natural to want to explain why events occurred the way that they have; and it’s understandable that, if one believes hindsight is 20-20, that […]

How Would You Assess Your Ability To Use Hindsight In Favorable And Useful Ways?

The benefits of hindsight have generally to do with learning from mistakes and the purported ability to develop complete understanding (as in 20-20 hindsight) of the past. What happens if we’re wearing less than perfect “lenses” as we review the past? I’ve known many people who carry what I call a “cup of worry” that […]

“It May Be Difficult To Learn From Our Mistakes” ~ Diane Halpern

Not everyone shares the same sanguine view of hindsight. Author Diane Halpern is downright contrarian and writes: “Hindsight is of little value in the decision-making process. It distorts our memory for events that occurred at the time of the decision so that the actual consequence seems to have been a ‘foregone conclusion.’ Thus, it may […]

Is Hindsight Truly 20-20?

The old saying is that hindsight is 20-20, but is it really? Perhaps in an ideal world, we’d learn from our mistakes so well that our analysis of what happened would be perfect – but life experience teaches that often the same kinds of analyses that produced the “mistake” in the first place are at […]