The Decisions You Don’t Revisit Are Shaping Your Business
- Dr. Jeff Doolittle
- Mar 30
- 6 min read
And influencing the way you lead, think, and show up every day
What if your greatest risk is not the decisions you make, but the ones you never examine? Everyone is busy. Organizations are busy. Calendars are full. Decisions are made quickly. That pace is often necessary, but it creates a quiet tradeoff. Very little time is spent stepping back to understand what those decisions actually produced or why. This is where outcomes separate from moving ahead or falling behind.
Leaders do not improve simply by working longer or harder. They improve by becoming more intentional about how they think, decide, and learn. Evidence reinforces this. Spending just fifteen minutes a day reflecting can improve performance by as much as 23% compared to simply gaining additional experience.We also know from decision science that humans default to fast, intuitive thinking. Rapid decisions are efficient, but under complexity and pressure, they are consistently biased toward our preferences.
Sometimes errors in leadership result from inaction; often, they result from misjudgment. When moving quickly, misjudgments are harder to see and easier to repeat. That is why high-performing teams build structured reflection into after-action reviews. It is what turns experience into learning instead of repetition. The pattern is consistent. It is not experience that improves performance. It is the ability to reflect on that experience and learn from it. Without reflection, even the most capable leaders and organizations can move quickly while repeating the same patterns. Reflection is the difference between activity and improvement.
Why Reflection Matters More Than We Think
Reflection is often viewed only as a personal habit. Something leaders do to improve self-awareness or productivity. And it does both. But its impact extends far beyond individual performance. Reflection helps leaders and teams recognize patterns, challenge assumptions, and better understand the connection between decisions and outcomes. Without it, confidence can grow faster than clarity. Leaders continue making decisions. Organizations continue executing. But the thinking behind those decisions remains largely unexamined. Over time, that gap compounds.
Effective reflection involves the ability to doubt, pause, and be curious even about the ordinary. The practice of reflection provides a path to deeper understanding. It enables leaders to consider and learn about underlying contexts and causes for results.
Evidence suggests that spending 15 minutes a day improves productivity by as much as 23% compared to those without reflection time. Researchers found that the benefit of additional experience is inferior to deliberately translating and organizing previously accumulated experiences.
Sometimes reflection creates discomfort and conflict at both the individual and organizational levels as leaders wrestle with self-limiting beliefs and failure. However, leaders risk repeating bad decisions that could prove disastrous if they fail to consider alternate viewpoints. The best mindset to adopt is not to let a difficult past situation go to waste.
The Leadership Dimension
At the individual level, reflection creates space. Space to pause. Space to think. Space to question what feels obvious. In that space, leaders begin to see:
where their assumptions influenced outcomes
where bias-shaped decisions
where a different approach may have led to a better result
This is not about slowing down for the sake of slowing down. It is about improving the quality of the decisions that drive everything else.
The ability to reflect requires open-mindedness, responsibility, and a willingness to evaluate oneself honestly.
Open-mindedness: The desire to listen to other points of view and recognize that even the most strongly held beliefs may be questioned. Open-minded leaders have very few ideas that cannot be changed.
Responsibility: The desire to pursue truth and apply it to today's situations.
Wholeheartedness: A sincere attitude toward the critical evaluation of themselves and others. An unwavering commitment to make necessary changes and overcome the fear of failure.
These are not soft qualities. They are what allow leaders to learn faster than the complexity around them.
Conversely, narcissists generally lack the empathetic self-reflection necessary to facilitate self-reflection. While we all possess narcissism to some degree, if you are worried that you might be too much of a narcissist, relax; you probably are not.
The Organizational Dimension
While reflection begins with individuals, its real impact shows up at the organizational level. Most organizations are built to execute:
Goals are set
Plans are developed
Results are measured
Fewer are built to consistently learn from those results. Without shared reflection:
Insights stay with individuals
Teams interpret outcomes differently
The same challenges reappear in new forms
Experience accumulates, but learning remains uneven. When reflection becomes part of how an organization operates, something shifts. Teams align more quickly. Decisions improve over time. Patterns become visible earlier. The organization begins to learn as a system, not just as a collection of individuals.
Practices That Make Reflection Work
Reflection does not need to be complex to be effective. It needs to be intentional. Set aside time. Even brief moments of focused thinking can create clarity.
This is a potentially obvious point, but crucial. Planning is often the most significant barrier to reflection. You get too busy or distracted and move on to the next thing before reflecting. It doesn't have to be a lot of time, but I recommend scheduling at least 20 minutes in a quiet place.
Narrow your focus. Reflect on specific decisions, time periods, or experiences rather than everything at once.
Let's be honest; it is hard for most of us to remember last week, much less last year. Rather than considering the whole year, break the year into periods or quarters. Then focus on each segment of time separately.
Taking a strategic approach helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. The following powerful questions, taken from an after-action review process used by the military, provide a structure for your reflection:
What was expected to happen?
What actually occurred?
What went well and why?
What can be improved and how?
These questions help connect actions to outcomes in a meaningful way. Maintain a balanced perspective. Recognize both strengths and areas for improvement. Growth comes from understanding both.
Adopt a strengths mindset. It is easy to be drawn to what is not right and focus on your weaknesses during reflection. Having a balanced focus is not about ignoring weaknesses; it's about prioritizing, pursuing, and leveraging strengths and opportunities to bring out your best. Consider what strengths contributed to your success.
Tools That Strengthen Reflection
Reflection is often more effective when supported by simple tools.
Use a journaling app like Day One to capture your thoughts, feelings, successes, and frustrations. This approach has been demonstrated to be incredibly impactful on leader-follower relationships, clarity of purpose, and the acquisition of new skills. Like building any habit, start small and tie it to an existing practice, like your routine, before you leave the office for the day.
Critical reflection should be a social process. It is most successful when collaborative. Leaders need to understand how followers perceive their actions. Using a leadership 360 assessment is one proven tool to improve critical reflection. These assessments typically gather feedback from their leader, peers, and direct reports, allowing comparisons with others. This is one leadership assessment you need to be using.
Thought leadership introduces new ideas that challenge assumptions and expand understanding. Books, articles, and assessments on leadership can help leaders examine a particular situation from different perspectives, fostering critical reflection. Thought leadership grounded in research provides leaders with proven solutions that can be applied and shorten the learning process. If you are not a skilled speed reader, you may be surprised that you can learn how to read a book in an hour. Like any skill, there are tips and tricks to increase your speed and retention.
Here is a bonus link to an assembled collection of my top five favorite books from thought leaders on change management, coaching, culture, innovation and creativity, leadership style, servant leadership, and strategic planning.
Used together, these tools help turn reflection into consistent learning.
Making Reflection Part of How You Lead and Operate
The opportunity is not simply to reflect more. It is to reflect with purpose. For leaders, this means creating space to think and question. For organizations, it means creating space within the rhythm of work to step back and learn.
After decisions are made.After projects are completed.Before moving on to what is next.
When reflection becomes part of how work gets done, learning becomes part of how progress is made.
Everyone is busy. Work continues. Decisions are made. Momentum builds.
But without reflection, it is possible to move quickly while staying in the same patterns.
With reflection, those same experiences become a source of clarity, learning, and better decisions.
The question is not whether reflection is valuable. The question is: What decisions have you not revisited that are still shaping your business today?
References:
Densten, I. L., & Gray, J. H. (2001). Leadership development and reflection: What is the connection? International Journal of Educational Management, 15(3), 119-124.
Di Stefano, Gino, F., Pisano, G. P., & Staats, B. R. (2016). Making Experience Count: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning. IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc.
Gardner, S. & Albee, D. (2015). Study focuses on strategies for achieving goals,
resolutions. Dominican University of California.
Helyer, R. (2015). Learning through reflection: the critical role of reflection in work-based learning (WBL). Journal of Work-Applied Management.
Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup Press.
