The one decision making bias that managers can never eliminate
Making decisions is a critical part of every executive’s job. One of the things you learn as you climb the corporate ladder is that you and you colleagues can end up making sub-optimal decisions. This is rarely because of poor critical thinking faculties but rather because often invisible traps hardwired into our thinking processes, letting through only information that conforms with our current beliefs, temperament and expectations. As decision makers we come to the table armed with our own perspectives, preferences, filters, heuristics and biases, influenced by a broad range of social influences many which operate subliminally. One of the key messages in emotional intelligence circles is that you need first to understand the core emotional drives in your personality and second how to manage them.
In my previous blog I mentioned that I had attended a series of lectures at the London Business School as part of an alumni reunion. Another speaker was Meena Thuraisingham whose lecture was titled Good Intentions Bad Decisions. She has written a book The Secret Life of Decisions and talked about the various distortions that impact our reasoning ability. For example one of the most common mistakes made by team leaders is to forget that we like those who are like ourselves. Hence when we choose team members we choose those candidates who are like us.
I will never forget the first day I started learning about emotional intelligence. The workshop leader described how his company had conducted psychological profiles on the ten members of the executive management team of what was at that time Australia’s leading property developer. He went to see the Managing Director, who was a classic CEO, energetic, decisive and an egomaniac. The MD started the meeting by saying that he was sure the tests demonstrated that his company had one of the best management teams in Australia. The workshop leader disagreed saying that too many of the team were like the MD, and in an industry notoriously cyclical like building, it was critical that one or two members of the team were risk adverse. Unfortunately in this management team, nobody had high aversion to risk, so the company was particularly vulnerable. The Managing Director, optimistic and forthright, dismissed the report as psychobabble. Within 12 months the company had collapsed and at the time was Australia’s biggest corporate failure.
Wikipedia lists 170 different biases that can affect our thinking ranging from the Ambiguity effect to the Zeigarnik effect. The Ambiguity effect is the tendency for decision makers to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown while the Zeigarnik effect is that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better by executives than completed ones. The main message from Meena was that managers needed to introduce processes to overcome the biases in their decision making and move from intuitive to logical decision making. This is easier said than done. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has much the same message. Decision makers need to shift from System 1 (fast, instinctive and emotional) to System 2 (slower, more deliberative, and more logical.)
Meena mentioned one bias that that I had never heard of before that truly resonated. I was familiar with what is known as Bias blind spot – this is the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, and to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself. I have always seen this as subset of the Superiority bias. We all overestimate our desirable qualities, and underestimate our undesirable qualities, relative to other people. However according to Meena there was only one certainty in decision making; namely certainty by the decision maker that he or she was 100% objective. It is certainly useful the next time you are faced with a decision to consider how much it is objective and how much contains your subjective bias.
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"Put in a sales perspective, I loved your presentation! I got a lot from what you talked about and I will read your book."
Peter Morris, Executive Officer, Lomax Financial Group
Your presentation on 'Lifting your Level of Emotional Intelligence" to 10 CEOs scored an average 8.9 out of 10 for the topic and 8.5 for the presentation which is great. A couple of the attendees gave you a 10 out of 10, and the comments were:
- Great presentation. Very informative.
- Excellent presentation.
- made me think.
Christi Spring CEO Institute. - web www.ceo.com.au.
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