The Scoreboard Doesn't Tell the Whole Story
One of the lessons I learned early in my career in professional baseball is that results matter.
Attendance matters. Revenue matters. Wins and losses matter.
There is always a scoreboard.
But I also learned that the scoreboard doesn't always tell you whether you made a good decision.
In minor league baseball, we could spend months planning a promotion. We'd have a great marketing plan, strong advance sales, a good opponent and everything lined up for a big night.
Then it would be 105 degrees in the Central Valley.
Nobody wanted to sit in a ballpark for three hours.
The attendance number at the end of the night might suggest we failed. But I wouldn't necessarily agree.
Of course, the opposite can happen too. Sometimes circumstances beyond our control make us look a lot smarter than we actually were.
I remember an Easter Sunday when Randy Johnson was scheduled to make a rehabilitation start against us. Easter Sunday wasn't exactly a date we circled on the calendar expecting a huge crowd.
Suddenly, we had a sellout.
People came to see Randy Johnson pitch. Once he left the game, a good portion of the crowd left too.
The scoreboard said we had a great day.
I'm not sure we could take much credit for it.
Business works much the same way.
We tend to judge decisions by their outcomes.
A successful hire validates our hiring process. Increased sales mean the strategy worked. A failed initiative must have been a bad idea.
Sometimes that's true.
But sometimes we confuse a good outcome with a good decision. And a bad outcome with a bad one.
Those aren't always the same thing.
I've come to believe that one of the responsibilities of leadership is understanding the difference.
When evaluating a decision, I try to separate what we knew and controlled at the time from what we learned afterward.
If a new initiative doesn't deliver the expected results, I want to understand whether our assumptions were reasonable, whether we considered the risks and whether something happened that we couldn't reasonably have anticipated.
If the process was sound, we may not need to change it simply because the outcome was disappointing.
On the other hand, if we achieved a great result despite poor planning or questionable judgment, we shouldn't assume the process deserves to be repeated.
The real test is whether we'd make the same decision again with the same information.
That distinction matters beyond any single decision. It influences how we develop people and how comfortable they feel exercising judgment.
When we reward every successful outcome, we may be rewarding luck rather than good decision-making. When we criticize every unsuccessful one, we risk creating an organization where people become reluctant to make decisions.
Of course, a sound process isn't a permanent excuse for disappointing results. If the same approach consistently produces poor outcomes, something needs to change.
I still believe in keeping score. I've spent too much of my career in environments where results matter to suggest otherwise.
But I've also learned to be careful about what those results are actually telling me.
Sometimes a good decision produces a bad result. Sometimes a bad decision produces a great one.
The challenge for leaders is knowing the difference.
Because the scoreboard doesn't always tell the whole story.
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