It's easy to end the year cataloguing wins. The more valuable list is the shorter, quieter one: the things you got wrong — and, harder still, the things you got wrong and kept doing anyway.
The mistakes you repeated
Everyone makes mistakes; strong teams don't make the same one twice. The year-end question worth sitting with isn't "what went wrong" but "what went wrong that we'd already seen go wrong before?" A repeated mistake isn't bad luck. It's a signal that something in how you decide hasn't changed — and that's the thing actually worth fixing.
Worth naming honestly:
- A call you got wrong — and whether you'd have the information to get it right next time.
- A problem you saw early and didn't act on, and why.
- Something quietly not working that you've kept funding out of habit or hope.
The mistakes worth studying aren't the new ones. They're the ones you've made before and are somehow making again.
Naming what you got wrong, without flinching and without ceremony, is how a team earns the right to be trusted with bigger decisions. The goal isn't guilt. It's to make next year's mistakes new ones.