The value of regret

As another year ticks to a close, I'm reminded that dealing appropriately and effectively with what happens – or doesn’t happen – is an essential skill.

Daniel H. Pink’s The Power of Regret opens by exploring how the ‘no regrets’ school of self-help has come to dominate the topic of reflection and success. As a signal to where the book is heading, he then points out that tattoo removal is a $100million industry in the USA alone. As a sidebar, he also reveals that Edith Piaf only came into possession of her signature song (No, Je Ne Regrette Rien) three years before she died (somewhat prematurely, and diminished by hard living, at the age of 47).

Deluded, depressing or directional?

Based on extensive research, the book looks at what regret means for the individual and often focuses on their personal life. Pink argues that regret is a valuable, powerful trigger for reflecting on our response to and performance in the face of external events. Acknowledging that ignoring regrets is delusion and dwelling on them is depressing, he suggests that their real purpose is to trigger reflection directed at learning, understanding, better decisions and improved performance.

Regret and the organisation

The unfortunate side effect of the ‘no regrets’ mode of thinking is a lack of reflection. I think that the real opportunity is to leverage the book’s lessons and models for learning in the sphere of work and leadership. Great strides have been made to make individuals, teams, and organisations more agile and responsive to reality so that services, products, and systems better fit their users and markets. Ideas like ‘failing quickly’ also require preparing appropriately and learning effectively from experience.

The objective isn’t to fail; it’s to succeed but to accept that the road to success isn’t always a straight one. Learning from the bumps in the road and even pondering whether successes could have been bigger, better or different is the lesson.

Regret and future performance

Pink argues that regret reduces the cognitive biases that see people often increasing their commitment to the failing strategy. The theory is that the stab of negativity that regret involves can slow us down and consider a broader range of options. Perhaps ironically, being open to regret can make us more persistent – something that almost always leads to better performance. He details a range of studies that show that simply getting test subjects to consider regret led to better performance - as long as they didn’t dwell on it too long.

And that seems to be the key takeaway: how do we help people deal properly with balancing regret, reflection and carrying on.

Continue reading: Daniel H. Pink ‘The Power of Regret’ (Canongate, 2022) Amazon