Bad is stronger than good

Is your fear of losing out clouding your thinking?  Are you persisting with a poor strategy just because you have invested a lot of time, effort or money in it?   Our evolutionary hard-wiring and hyper-sensitivity to danger and loss has helped us survive and become the most successful species on the planet, but this ancient survival strategy can inhibit growth and damage important relationships because it becomes the Thinking Trap of Safety.

Are you being too helpful for your own good?

One of the greatest challenges of leadership is how to use the level of power you have to ensure mutual needs are met.  This is the key to enduring and positive relationships.  While it’s great to be helpful, if it’s not balanced it can lead to unintended consequences like not achieving the key result you are accountable for because they require your attention and skills.  However, if you are overly assertive and only ensure that your own needs are met you end up being self-centred and dominating which can rapidly erode trust and undermine the possibility of long term relationships. 

How is distance affecting your thinking?

Your perception of distance has a profound effect on your thinking and decision making.  When a tragedy occurs in a particular neighbourhood people often say we didn’t expect that ‘here’.  We are so used to hearing about awful things happening in distant places but when it happens in our own neighbourhood we are far more shocked.  This is very understandable.  The closer an incident is to us the more we feel that it could have happened to us.  However, it is interesting how we unconsciously transfer this thinking to abstract concepts like time and ownership, and it can create the Thinking Trap of Distance.

Are you limited by the people around you?

You are being limited by the experience of the people around you.  Many Leadership teams fall into the Thinking Trap of Experience because they believe that once a subject or idea is discussed and debated by the team it is sufficient to make a good decision.  Sadly, most Leadership teams are lacking the necessary diversity to fully consider the complexities of the current technological, political, social and volatile economic environments.

The Thinking Trap of Expedience

Even President Trump has had to admit that things are more complicated than he initially thought!  While this is no surprise to most of us, many people don’t even notice that their brain is massively simplifying the complexities of the world they live in just to make some sense of it.  What are you over-simplifying? 

The Thinking Trap of Similarity

What media do you consume?  Who do you listen to?  Whose opinions do you agree or disagree with?  One of the key skills of living in the 21^st century is being able to filter the vast amount of data, information, opinion and highly sophisticated marketing that are bombarding us almost every waking hour.  In order to make any sense of it all we are constantly making choices about what we pay heed to. 

The 5 Thinking Traps

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.