Judge the decision, not the result.
The tool that reviews something that went wrong, or surprisingly right, and separates the part that was your decision from the part that was luck, so you learn the lesson that survives.
The most expensive mistake after the fact is judging a decision by how it turned out. A deal that closed proves the pitch was right. A launch that flopped proves the idea was wrong. Neither is true. Outcomes are decisions plus luck, and people draw the obvious lesson and bake the luck into their strategy as if it were skill.
What Actually Happened pulls the two apart. It reconstructs what was known at the time of the decision, separates that from what only became visible afterwards, and names the lesson that would still hold if the dice had landed differently.
Learn the right lesson, not the obvious one.
Same lost deal, same five minutes. Here is the post-mortem, run two ways.
You lost a £200k deal you were sure you would win. It went to a competitor in the final week, after four months of positive signals. You want to know what you did wrong.
You ask what went wrong. You get a thoughtful list. Maybe you should have qualified harder, built more champions, competed on price, followed up sooner. All plausible. All retrofitted to the fact that you lost.
So you walk away with a lesson shaped by the outcome, ready to overcorrect on the next deal that looks nothing like this one.
It refuses to judge the decision by the result. First it separates what you knew then from what you learned after:
- →Known then: a parallel procurement process you glossed over
- →Hindsight: the competitor's 40% final-week price cut
- →Hindsight: a new CFO who favoured the incumbent
Then the lesson that survives: when a known parallel process exists, find out who else is bidding by the third meeting. It survives because it would have helped regardless of the price cut. The lesson is NOT compete on price, the cut was luck, and chasing it would win you worse deals.
The cold version gave you a lesson shaped by the loss. This gave you the one that survives the luck.
- ✦Founders reviewing a deal lost, a launch flopped, or a hire that failed
- ✦Operators who know a good outcome can follow a bad decision, and the reverse
- ✦Anyone tempted to rewrite a whole strategy on the back of one vivid result
- →what-actually-happened.zip — a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →what-actually-happened-skill.md — plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts — anywhere
- →A README inside the zip with install steps for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the API
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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Before you buy.
How is this different from just asking Claude directly?
Asked cold, Claude retrofits a list of lessons to the fact that things went wrong, which is exactly the trap, judging the decision by its outcome. This reconstructs what was knowable at the time, judges the decision on that alone, separates the luck from the skill, and keeps only the lesson that would hold if the result had gone the other way. Sometimes that lesson is nothing to change.
Will this work with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs?
Yes. You get a native Claude Skill (.zip) that auto-invokes in Claude, plus a plain .md you can paste into a ChatGPT Custom GPT, a Gemini system prompt, or any LLM. The procedure travels with the file.
Can I share this with my team?
It's licensed for your own personal and professional use. The output it produces is yours to circulate. To put the Tool itself in the hands of a whole team, email hello@authority.md about team licensing.
What if it doesn't work for me?
If the file hasn't been delivered, or arrives defective or empty, we refund in full — see the refund policy in our terms.
What Actually Happened is a decision-review tool. Not a substitute for an honest team debrief or a real conversation with the other party.