We all know that making mistakes is needed to learn from them, in order to do things better in the future. Indeed, people are often told to learn from mistakes, to maximize return on failure. But how exactly should we deal with moments of failure? Roese (2016) developed a mental protocol – based on counterfactual thinking – with 5 steps that one can use in such setback situations. It is a set of short, but structured questions you need to ask (yourself) to recover and learn from setbacks:
UPWARD COUNTERFACTUAL
In what way could the outcome be different in a positive way?
It is important to
focus on your own actions and the way those actions change in order to positively change the outcome.
UPWARD COUNTERFACTUAL PART 2
What other path would have lead to a better outcome?
The reason why two alternative paths need to be envisaged has to do with the
prevention of hindsight bias: the tendency to start seeing the event as having been predictable all along (without an
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