Hindsight is always superior

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to look back and think “ it was so obvious that was going to happen, the clues were all there. “

The helpful clues might have been there, but so were thousands of unhelpful clues that only separated themselves after the fact.

In Don Norman’s book “ The Design of Everyday Things “ he shares some thoughts on that:

Hindsight is always superior to foresight. When the accident investigation committee reviews the event that contributed to the problem, they know what actually happened, so it is easy for them to pick out which information was relevant, which was not. This is retrospective decision making. But when the incident was taking place, the people were probably overwhelmed with far too much irrelevant information and probably not a lot of relevant information.

Taking it a bit further…

Hindsight makes events seem obvious and predictable. Foresight is difficult. During an incident, there are never clear clues. Many things are happening at once: workload is high, emotions and stress levels are high. Many things that are happening will turn out to be irrelevant. Things that appear irrelevant will turn out to be critical. The accident investigators, working with hindsight, knowing what really happened, will focus on the relevant information and ignore the…