On Sunday morning, my wife, eldest daughter, and I decided we'd like to see a matinee showing of Wedding Chasers. Friday was its debut in Wichita and my wife mentioned in passing that because of that it might sell out.
Sitting in my chair with hot coffee and a good book in hand, I got the silly idea that I might be able to call ahead and reserve the tickets. I found the phone number, struggled through the confusing (and annoying) voice menu system, mis-typed my credit card, re-entered it, and ended up paying $1 more per ticket for this effort. But I had achieved my purpose. I had reserved spots for us in case the movie sold out, which I proudly declared for all the house to hear.
Later, driving into a half-empty parking lot at the theater, my wife asked, "did you have to pay anything extra to get the tickets over the phone?"
With intellegence and wit, I responded, "uhhhh..."
Facing the "you bonehead" look on my wife's face and the smirk on my daughter's, I did what any good husband would do -- I blamed my wife for telling me that the movie might sell out.
When that didn't work, I resorted to the Decision Rights dimension in MBM -- since mine were seriously in jeopardy at that point.
Did I make the right decision? No. But did I make a good decision? I think so. The difference in those two answers comes from the perspective of where you're standing in time. Ex-post (after the fact), after a decision has played out, we can see the consequences and can judge if it was right or wrong. However, ex-ante (before the fact), when we're making the decision and looking into an uncertain future, we can't know what the consequences might be - we can only speculate.
Ex-post, my decision was wrong - I paid $3, a hot cup of coffee, 15 minutes of reading (and a lot of guff from my wife and daughter afterwards) for the right to advance purchase tickets to a show that wasn't even close to being sold out.
Ex-ante, I didn't know if the show would sell out or not, but I was operating on an assumption (provided by my wife I might add) that there was a distinct possibility it just might. We really wanted to see that movie at that time. It would have been costly to show up and not get in due to a sell-out crowd -- psychologically to us anyway. That created a lot of uneasiness for me -- and it was worth $3 and the hassle to get rid of that uneasiness.
Determining if a decision was right or wrong is less subjective than deciding if it was good or bad. That's why a healthy challenge processe and following our guiding principles are so important. It usually starts with holding yourself accountable (as in not blaming my wife - she offered her perspective, I chose to make it a key, unchallenged, assumption). Good decisions don't guarantee good outcomes (although it sure increases the odds) -- and sometimes bad decisions can have good outcomes (that's called luck).
Regardless, decisions that turn out to be wrong ex-post are not supposed to feel good, and we shouldn't expect our customers (my wife in this case) to be happy about them even if they agree we made a good decision (for the record, she does not think "we" made a good decision).
Would I make the same choice again if faced with a similar situation? I don't know... Past results inform future decisions. I will definitely re-examine the sell-out assumption (did I mention that it was my wife's assumption? Oops, sorry, I regressed).
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