8-Through the Rear-View Mirror: Hindsight Bias in Construction Procurement

If there’s one thing humans excel at, it’s being wise after the event. Richard I. Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail skewers this tendency: “Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.” Once disaster strikes, every misstep looks glaringly obvious. Cook warns us: knowing the outcome warps our view, making it near-impossible to judge what practitioners saw in the heat of the moment. Let’s unpack why hindsight is a dodgy lens, how it skews our take on failure, and how a network approach beats the blame game every time.

The Curse of the Crystal Ball

Cook’s point is clear: “Knowledge of the outcome makes it seem that events leading to the outcome should have appeared more salient to practitioners at the time than was actually the case.” Post-accident, we see a linear trail of dominoes; each topple “inevitably” leading to the crash. But the outcome of these interactions is never completely clear until it happens. Before the fall, those dominoes were just one path in a sprawling network of possibilities—practitioners weren’t blind; they were navigating a maze, not a motorway.

In construction procurement, this plays out daily. A project goes belly-up (say, a budget overrun or a structural snafu) and the post-mortem paints it as obvious. “They should’ve spotted the dodgy tender!” “Why didn’t they flag the late design?” Easy to say after the fact. At the time, those signals were buried in a blizzard of deadlines, emails, and the usual chaos of a live job. Hindsight turns what was a rabble into an orderly queue, but it is a fiction that poisons fair analysis.

The Domino Delusion in Action

Take R v Amec Building Ltd [1992], a case tied to a fatal crane collapse. Post-accident, the investigation zeroed in on a missed maintenance check” But rewind to the incident: the crane had passed prior inspections, the schedule was tight, and the team was juggling a dozen priorities. What looked like a neon warning in hindsight was just another Tuesday tick-box beforehand. The outcome (tragic as it was) cast a retrospective glow that made the path to failure seem inevitable, when it was anything but.

Or consider Tesco Stores Ltd v Dundee City Council [2012], a planning dispute that spiralled into a legal quagmire. After Tesco lost, analysts tutted that the retailer “should’ve seen” the council’s interpretation coming. Yet, at the time, the planning policy was a grey area, the stakes were high, and the decision to push ahead was a calculated punt, not a reckless lunge. Hindsight turned a gamble into a gaffe.

Rewriting the Script: Network Over Narrative

Forget the dominoes—map the maze. Chart the system’s connections (design delays feeding into procurement bottlenecks, subcontractor hiccups clashing with tight budgets) and mark the moments where choices locked in the disaster. The aim is not to find“the” cause, rather it’s about seeing how the system’s web funneled events to a breaking point. Any post-accident analysis should include a network path charting the various inflection points that solidified the path to failure. 

Why bother? Because it opens up the wider system to analysis and correction. A network approach reveals where tweaks (like better communication or a looser timeline) might have diverted the path. It’s less sexy than a smoking gun, but it’s truer to the mess of procurement and far more useful for fixing it.

For clients, resist the urge to play armchair critic. When failure hits, don’t ask “why didn’t they see it?”—ask “what did they see?” Push for a network analysis that maps the system’s pressure points, not a finger-pointing report that flatters your 20/20 hindsight.

For consultants, document the fog of war. Keep a real-time log of decisions and their context (why that spec, why that deadline) so post-accident reviews don’t paint you as clueless. Feed into a network map that shows how your bit tangled with the rest.

For contractors, own your slice of the chaos, but don’t take the fall for the system. When the blame game starts, point to the web: your late delivery might tie back to a delayed design or a client’s last-minute tweak. A network view spreads the load and the lessons.

The Takeaway: Ditch the Goggles, See the System

Hindsight bias is the enemy of truth in construction procurement. It turns a complex web of choices and chance into a neat little story where everyone “should’ve known.” This is the biggest hurdle to understanding failure, especially when human grit and expertise are in the mix. Judge practitioners by their knowledge in the moment, not ours, and swap the domino delusion for a network lens.

Next time a project craters, skip the “I told you so” and grab a map. Chart the paths, not the culprits, and you’ll learn more about keeping the next one upright. In a system this knotty, real insight comes from wrestling with the tangle as it was, not as it looks now. After all, in procurement, the only thing inevitable is the unexpected, so let’s stop pretending we saw it coming.