A near miss is an almost win and needs an “ante vitam” meeting

TLDR: Narrow misses feel worse than wide ones because it is easier to imagine all the things that might have gone differently. But regret is a red herring; a near miss is an almost win and needs an “ante vitam” meeting.

_

Imagine that you’re late for your train in two parallel universes. In one universe, you arrive on the platform just as the train is pulling away. In the other, you missed it by 30 minutes. Which universe would you rather be in?

Most people intuitively understand that missing it by a few seconds will feel worse and they’re right: we feel more regret about narrow misses than wider ones because of counterfactual thinking. It is easy to imagine a dozen “if only” ways you could have saved a few seconds: got out of the car quicker, chose your shirt faster, not had to look for your keys. It is harder to imagine saving 30 minutes.

Anticipating that regret, most of us would say we’d rather have missed it by a mile.

But regret is a red herring; it tends to make us focus on our past instead of our future. And that change in framing makes all the difference. Because in reality, missing something by a few seconds means that next time, you’re very likely to make it. If you are going to be taking this train every day, it is far better to have missed it by an inch than a mile.

Back to the train platforms. Now you’re not alone: you’re traveling with your best friend. 

When you miss by inches, the fingerpointing begins. Because when we feel regret, we often externalize it and begin the blame game; it feels better to grumble about how slow your best friend is than confront the reality that it might have been your fault. 

This happens all the time in workplaces: near misses devolve into analysis paralysis as Product, Design, Marketing, and Tech focus on who to castigate. Blame is easy because any number of decisions by any of the departments would have resulted in a win.

Think about the 2024 presidential election. As Democrats argue about “the reason” for losing, the reality is that with a popular vote margin of only about 1%, most of the cited reasons are valid and a change in any of them could have swung the balance. Racism, sexism, communication, the lack of a primary, whatever…they’re all on the table in the way they wouldn’t be with a 30% deficit.

It is important to teach your team to identify the size of a gap and to change your strategy accordingly. With wide misses, you need a few heavily resourced interventions capable of closing a large gap. But with almost wins, it is more important to spread your resources across a number of smaller bets, since any of them is enough to tip the balance. Making this explicit can help cross-functional teams quickly move away from blame and toward solutions.

The frame change can be as simple as a name change. A post mortem is “after death” and makes sense for wide misses. But for an almost win, consider an ante vitam meeting, because an intervention that almost worked is just “before life”.