What is documenting results?

Documenting results is a concept in personal epistemology: Recording what you tested and what happened creates a validation history.

Example: After testing your schema that 'senior engineers resist process changes because they fear losing autonomy,' you write down the schema, the three conversations where you tested it, and what actually happened. Two engineers confirmed the pattern. One resisted process changes but for a completely different reason — she had seen a similar initiative fail and was protecting the team from repeating a known mistake. Without that written record, you would have remembered 'my schema was basically right.' The documentation forces you to see that it was right in two cases and wrong in one — and that the one exception contains the most useful information.

This concept is part of Phase 15 (Schema Validation) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema validation.