How Biases Distort Decision-Making – and What You Can Do To Fight Them
You’ve just read an amazing study. According to the research, drinking a glass of red wine has health benefits comparable to spending an hour at the gym. This is fantastic news, because, first, you love red wine and, second, you’re an investor in fitness facilities!
So what do you do? Well, obviously, you go with your gut and buy yourself a vineyard. No need to think twice. No need to talk to your team. The future of fitness is wine!
Clearly, this would be a terrible mistake. Your personal fondness for the grape does not mean red wine will revolutionize the world of fitness. You are biased toward wine – and before you make any big business decisions, you’ve got to banish that bias.
The key message here is: We can’t eliminate bias. But we can take steps to reduce its effects.
Here’s the bad news: bias is hard to banish. And, within a large organization, it’s pretty much impossible to get rid of. Just consider a complex organization such as NASA: it’s full of individuals, each susceptible to various biases. But that doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and categorize bias as an insoluble problem. Why? Because bias is at the root of many organizational issues.
So how exactly does bias work? Well, if you’ve ever relied on your own subjective experience rather than objective facts when making a decision, then you’ve been led by bias. Bias is most common when people are making judgment calls – and it's no secret how commonplace judgment errors are, especially when it comes to business strategy.
In one survey, of about 2,000 executives asked, only 28 percent thought their company made good strategic decisions. The majority, about 60 percent, said the ratio of bad decisions to good was about the same, meaning that a coin flip might make as good – if not better – decisions than a team of highly-qualified executives. You can imagine how bad this is for business.
But, again, bias can’t be rooted out entirely. Luckily, it doesn’t need to be. Let’s return to the example of NASA. Sure, it’s full of biased individuals, but it’s also established collective processes that counteract those individual biases.
So how can you follow NASA’s lead and diminish bias within your business? One way is to reconsider your approach to leadership. Rather than being the person who makes the final call, aided by gut instinct alone, you should be someone who organizes how choices are presented. Becoming a decision architect instead of a decision maker, therefore, is the most effective way to lessen the impact of individual bias and steer your strategy in the right direction.
You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake! (2020) deals with the negative but often predictable effects that cognitive biases have on high-stakes decisions. Far from claiming that biases can be eliminated altogether, it demonstrates how every decision is colored by bias and outlines specific techniques that’ll help you make more rational, fact-based business decisions.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
