2026-08-26 16:31 Reframe me field note

The Distance Between a Decision and Its Consequences

Reading time: 2 min

While going through great people's stories, I was caught by an amazingly beautiful painting of Bismark and one story that provoked this note.

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen is reported to have said that anyone who had looked into the glazing eyes of a soldier dying on a battlefield would think carefully before starting a war.

It is a pretty unusual saying from Bismarck. He was hardly a pacifist and did not reject war as a political instrument. Known as the Iron Chancellor for a reason: he unified Germany through a combination of diplomacy, Realpolitik, and war and became the first Chancellor of the German Empire in 1871. He saw force as a legitimate political instrument when it served a strategic purpose. What makes his remark introducing the distance it exposes:

the same decision looks different depending on how far you stand from its consequences.

“30,000 casualties” is a number. One person dying in front of you is an experience.

From a government office, thirty thousand casualties are a number. On a battlefield, one casualty has a face. Both describe the same reality, but they do not produce the same judgment. Distance turns experience into abstraction, and abstraction makes difficult things strangely manageable.

This mechanism can be observed everywhere.

A restructuring looks efficient on a spreadsheet until you inherit the missing person's workload. A redesigned process looks cleaner on a diagram until you are the customer clicking through it. An assessment seems reasonable when you create it and exhausting when you have to complete it. The decision is made in one place; its real cost appears somewhere else.

Abstraction is sometimes a form of anesthesia.

We need abstraction. Without numbers, models and dashboards, most complex systems would be impossible to manage. Trouble starts when the representation quietly replaces the thing it represents. Efficiency loses the waiting. Productivity loses the fatigue. Conversion loses the hesitation. Headcount loses the people.

Sometimes improving a decision therefore requires less analysis, not more. Sit beside someone using what you designed. Follow your own customer journey. Complete the form. Enter the process from the other side. This is why simulations, prototypes, and role reversals can shift judgment when another presentation cannot: they bring consequences closer.

Information can tell us what happens. Proximity changes what the information means.

Some decisions are easy only because their consequences happen somewhere else. So when a decision feels unusually clean, rational and painless, I invite you to ask yourself:

How far am I standing from the person who will have to live with it?

Yours, Alex