Post Mortems

I won the guess the murderer contest.   Shai and I compete to guess who the real murderer is on Law and Order Criminal Intent.  Last night we watched Sunday's two hour show.  It's a toss up who wins, but one of us always gets it by two thirds of the way through.  That's the point where the amount of time left means the current suspect can't be the real murderer, and typically there was only one other possible suspect.  The more unlikely the suspect, the higher our certainty.  That just makes for better TV. 

 

This mechanism of diagnosis is not very helpful for figuring out real world problems.  There is no way to use a Tivo to tell you everything will be resolved in the next 20 minutes.  It does however have something in common with Post Mortems.   A Post Mortem is where the team shines the bright light of 20/20 hindsight on all the decisions that were hard.  This perspective is much like having the extra knowledge that everything will be wrapped up in 20 minutes.  Things that were unknowns are now knowns.  Those tough calls that could have caused problems, yet no problems appeared: obviously good decisions.  Those tough calls that did cause problems: obviously we shouldn't do that again … duh! 

 

Unfortunately these fantastic insights are entirely informed via knowledge not present at the time the decision was made.  I'm certainly not saying that Post mortems are useless!  It's just that after you've categorized the bad decisions and the good decisions you still need to synthesize some useful advice that does not require precognition to use properly.

 

On the other hand, making decisions based on what makes for good TV sounds like it could be fun.