There are two of you.
Same name, same CV, same intelligence, same experience. One of you makes the calls that built the company - the sharp reads, the well-timed refusals, the hire everyone else missed. The other one made the calls you don't talk about. You have met both versions. So has your board, though nobody in the room could tell you, on any given Tuesday, which one showed up.
The difference between them is not knowledge. Nothing you knew changed between your best decision and your worst. What changed was state. The condition of the system doing the deciding. And the reason this difference has never been managed is that we have no habit of looking at it. We look at decisions the only way we know how: by their outcomes.
Outcomes are a terrible teacher. A good decision can be punished by a market that moved, a partner that lied, a pandemic. A bad one can be rescued by luck and enter company legend as vision. Poker players have a word for judging a decision by its result. They call it resulting, and they consider it the amateur's defining error. In business we don't have a word for it, because it isn't considered an error. It's considered performance review.
Sport had exactly this problem, and its solution is the most useful idea I know.
For most of its history, athletic performance was explained the way boardroom performance still is: with character words. Heart. Hunger. A big engine, said with a shrug. Race results were the only data, and race results are noisy: weather, tactics, who else turned up. Then physiologists did something quietly radical. They stopped trying to explain outcomes and started measuring inputs. They put athletes on treadmills and measured, among other things, the maximum rate at which a body could take in and use oxygen. VO2max. A number that says nothing about whether you will win on Saturday, and everything about what the engine is capable of before the race is run.
That separation (capacity on one side, results on the other) is what turned training from folklore into a discipline. Once the input side could be measured, it could be developed, and its condition on a given day could be known rather than guessed. The character words didn't disappear from sport. They just stopped being the explanation.
Now run the same separation on deciding.
The outcome side of a decision is hopelessly contaminated - luck, timing, other people's choices. You will never get a clean signal there, which is why "learning from results" mostly produces confident stories. But the input side of a decision is not contaminated at all. A decision is produced by a biological system, and that system's condition is measurable in the same unglamorous way an athlete's is. How the nervous system is balancing demand and recovery. What last night's sleep actually consisted of, as distinct from how long you were horizontal. How fast and how accurately the cognitive machinery is running today - attention, working memory, impulse control, the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than grab the first exit. None of this is exotic. All of it moves, day to day, and all of it moves with load in ways that are consistent enough to map.
Which means your judgement has something like a VO2max. Not only a metaphorical one. A testable input side: the capacity of the system that produces your decisions, measurable component by component, independently of whether any particular decision worked out. You have simply never been tested, because you have spent your career in the folklore era, where the engine is inferred from race results and the explanations are character words.
Notice what this does and doesn't claim. It doesn't claim that a well-conditioned decision-maker gets every call right; no capacity guarantees an outcome, in sport or anywhere else. What it claims is narrower and harder to argue with: that the same call, made by the two versions of you, is not the same call. That the gap between those versions is physical before it is anything else. And that physical gaps, unlike luck, can be measured, tracked and closed.
You cannot control whether the market rewards a decision. You cannot control the other side of the table. Of everything that determines how your next consequential call goes, exactly one factor is fully yours and fully knowable in advance: which version of you walks into the room.
Sport learned to stop guessing about that. It is the field that did it first, and still does it best.