All
your decisions are biased! This is a
simple fact that we all need to get more used to. If we don’t we are in danger of allowing a
lot of automatic, and often unhelpful, patterns of thinking influence the major
decisions we make. This could be anything from recruiting for a key role in our
business or choosing a key supplier, to making a critical strategic decision or
voting in an election. However, these
thinking traps also blur the hundreds of tiny decisions we make every day.
If
you have a brain, you are biased. This
curious aspect of our thinking (I like to call them Thinking Traps) is a
fundamental part of who we are but it was developed over millennia as a
survival strategy while we were still hunter-gatherers. The world we live in has changed a bit since
then but our brains are still using the same patterns of thought.
The danger is very
real
As
anyone who has ever attempted a diet will know it can take a lot of effort to
change our patterns of thinking or behaviour.
The danger of allowing your biases to trap your thinking and your
decision-making is very real. I frequently
meet Directors and Managers who have made poor recruitment decisions because
they let their biases influence them.
There are also many stories of Boards of Directors allowing their common
biases to make decisions that lead their business to ruin. Just remember the thinking that led to the
Global Financial Crises, not to mention the recent election results that may
well harm the very people who voted for their preferred candidate or referendum
result.
The
good news is that Neuro and Behavioural Scientists are conducting lots of
fascinating experiments that shine a light on our thinking. This exciting field is still very new and
fresh discoveries are being made every week.
I love the way that science is now catching up with a lot of ancient
wisdom. Wise teachers have been saying
for thousands of years that we should practice more self-awareness and
mindfulness so we can have a richer and fuller life with more joy and peace of
mind. Now the scientists are coming to
the same conclusions. They are conducting
experiments that show how fallible we are and that we have a number of
automatic heuristics (simple and quick rules-of-thumb) that we use because it
is an efficient way to think.
The brain loves
efficiency
The
brain loves efficiency and as part of its fundamental survival strategy it
avoids exerting unnecessary effort on difficult decisions or concepts. This goes back to conserving energy for
survival. However, we now live in a very
complex world that requires lots of decisions on a daily basis - from
responding to emails to filtering the vast amount of information that is
threatening to drown us while yelling that everything is urgent and important
and that we’ll miss out if we don’t do this or that. So it’s not surprising that we are all trying
to make efficient decisions and stay on top of things.
David
Rock and his team spend a lot of time reading through the vast amount of
experiments the scientists are writing about and filter out some of the most
useful bits that we can utilise in our day to day work. The scientists refer to the efficient
decision-making or heuristics mentioned above as ‘Unconscious Bias’, and have
labelled about 150 of them. This is not
particularly helpful because it is too many.
However, Rock and his team have put them into five distinct categories
that make them more manageable.
Not
only are these categories useful to remember, there are some tips for each so
you can counter the natural urge that your brain has to jump to conclusions and
make poor decisions.
Over
the coming weeks I will go through each one but here is a quick overview. They can be remembered by the mnemonic
SEEDS.
An overview of The
Five Thinking Traps
1. Similarity – this is about
thinking that people like you are better.
The antidote is to find commonality with people who are different to
us.
2. Expedience – this
bias is about the availability of information and the ease with which we can
confirm it. The antidote is to consider
all the information available and seek alternative perspectives even if it
makes you feel uncomfortable.
3. Experience – this bias
is created when we are surrounded by people who have the same experience as us
and we all quickly reach the same conclusion.
It also happens when we make assumptions about the behaviour of others
because of how it makes us feel. The
antidote to this is to get different perspectives from alternative sources and
give others the benefit of the doubt.
4. Distance – this
bias is about proximity and how we give something that is closer to us in time
or space more importance. The antidote
is to remove distance from the equation or play with ‘what if’ scenarios that
are far closer or far more distant in time or space.
5. Safety – this is about the
feelings of personal loss or threat to our security. The antidote is to create
some psychological distance from the situation, for example; consider what you
would say or what advice you would give to someone close to you in a similar
situation.
Look
out for my next article which will go into one of the above in more detail and
give you more tips on how you can avoid the thinking trap by practicing the
antidote.
With best regards,
David Klaasen
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