The Silent Demotion

A position leaves your working set without ever being evaluated, because something more urgent took its slot. It is not a decision. It is an outcome, and it is indistinguishable from a decision until the moment it costs you something.

A wrong call files its own correction. It is written down, it has a date, and reality eventually contradicts it. An absent call has none of those properties, which is why nobody catches it. Nothing in the document is incorrect. There is no error to notice, no claim to test, no feedback to receive.

Where it came from

In December 2020 I wrote a six-item list of what would matter in real estate technology the following year. AI had been on the two lists before it. It was not on that one, and I never decided to remove it. It lost to six things that were on fire, all of them real problems my readers had that month. Twenty-four months later, ChatGPT was released.

When to run this

Before any annual or quarterly planning cycle, on the plan from two years ago rather than last quarter's. Old enough that nobody in the room is defending it.

The steps

Pull the actual document from two years ago. Board deck, strategy memo, offsite output, annual plan. Find it rather than remember it, because memory grades generously.
Grade it in three columns, not two. Right, wrong, and right for the wrong reason. The third column does the work.
Put that document beside the one from the year before, on paper, side by side rather than holding one and reading the other.
List what was on the earlier one and not the later one.
For each item, answer one question: did I decide this stopped mattering, or did it lose a competition for space?

What a bad answer looks like

An empty fell-off list usually means the comparison was done from memory. Most plans drop several items a year.

A long list of things that all deserved to drop is not a finding either. You are looking for one or two items where something urgent beat something important.

And note the word decide. You almost certainly did think about the item. The question is whether you reached a conclusion you would have been willing to write down at the time.

What to do with the output

Anything in the third grading column is a place where you have been rewarding a method that did not earn it. Rewarded methods get reused.

Anything that lost a competition for space is an item you hold no position on, which means you will not notice when it changes. Either take a position now or write down that you are letting it go, so the next review has something to argue with.