Shane Parrish at Farnam Street offers that organizations frequently don’t differentiate adequately between decisions and outcomes. In many cases, good management decisions may nonetheless have bad outcomes due to unforeseeable events. And even more dangerously to the organization, bad decisions may sometimes lead to good outcomes. In these cases neither the manager nor the organization can differentiate between luck and skill, and consequently they may learn the wrong lessons. Why it is important – in the military, leaders at all levels are accountable for accomplishing the mission. We should take care though to thoroughly assess what caused those mission outcomes – did the leader make a good decision (one that would have been praise-worthy had the outcome been good) with a bad outcome or did the leader make a bad decision with a bad outcome? What is the proper accountability in each case? Should we forgive those who made good decisions that had bad outcomes? Should we censor those who make bad decisions but got lucky? Interesting and important questions.