When a sale collapses at the last moment, most professionals instinctively replay the conversation — looking for the tactical error, the wrong word, the missed signal. But the 14th-century Jewish philosopher Gersonides noticed something about how we explain failure: we almost always attribute it to what happened near the end, because that's what's vivid. The actual cause is usually invisible, buried weeks earlier in how the relationship was framed before either party knew there was a relationship. Philosopher of science N.R. Hanson called this 'retroductive reasoning' — the mind works backward from a surprising outcome, and whatever it lands on first gets crowned as cause. In financial services, where deals gestate slowly and fail suddenly, this matters enormously: the post-mortem rarely autopsies the right body. The more useful discipline is what Gersonides called *chiddush* — genuinely novel re-examination, not confirmation dressed as inquiry. Before your next week begins, resist the pull toward the final conversation. The real leverage point is almost always in the earliest framing.

Think of a deal or relationship that ended badly in the last six months — what was the first moment you felt mild unease, and what did you do with that feeling?

Drawing from Philosophy of Science (Hanson's retroductive reasoning) combined with Medieval Jewish Epistemology (Gersonides) — N.R. Hanson (Patterns of Discovery, 1958, on retroduction) & Gersonides / Levi ben Gershom (Milhamot Hashem, 1329, on chiddush as genuine re-examination)