The Process <> Outcome Matrix: How to Find Peace in the Consequences of Your Actions

Some of the essays on this website are for my kids. This is one of those. However, if you are not one of my daughters, you are still welcome to read it.

When I was a basketball fanatic, I remember reading a letter that the President of the Philadelphia 76ers wrote as he resigned. In that letter, he had this line:

To do this [think correctly] requires you to divorce process from outcome. You can be right for the wrong reasons. [...] You can be wrong for the right reasons. ~ Sam Hinkie

At the time (and perhaps because he gave examples in a language I understood well at the time, NBA draft picks), this really clicked for me. I started to think of the actions and decisions I make, and their consequences, through the lens of a 2x2matrix.

First - Let's say that every action we take that ends with a GOOD outcome goes above this horizontal line, and every action that ends with a BAD outcome goes below.

Second, let's draw a vertical line that shows whether the process we used to choose that action was good or bad, regardless of what eventually happened with the outcome:

Now let's bring them together and see the result:

This is the Process <> Outcome Matrix. It turns out that this idea is not new. It's not clear if the original creator of this matrix is known, although it apparently has popped up in multiple places, including apparently this book (I wouldn't know, I've never read it). The point here is that I don't take credit for this idea at all, I just use it often.

Let's explore this with a silly example, to help it make more sense. Let's suppose I just finished a big spaghetti dinner, but there's still spaghetti on my plate. I'm going to throw the remaining spaghetti in the garbage. Here's how this matrix might look:

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Now - people don't really need help with the 2 squares where both process and outcome are good/bad. The reason this matrix is interesting is the other two squares:

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Have you ever heard this of this ancient prayer?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Well, here's a slice of the "wisdom" part. You can control the process, but not directly control the outcome:

The final two takeaways are this:

• If you followed a bad process but got a good outcome, be grateful that you are lucky, and did not learn the hard way (bad outcome). Learn your lesson now as far as what the right process should've been, and follow that next time.
• If you followed a good process but got a bad outcome, be at peace. It happens! You can't win every time, but if you continue to follow the right process, you will win more often than not.