Hello Everyone,
Drawing a false conclusion is the most unproductive action which leads to derail our intended outcome. Cognitive bias’s reflect our tendency to draw false conclusions about the world. If we want to get better at decision making and to avoid mistakes which could send us off a cliff, learning and understanding the more common bias’s is critical. Let me list some of them to consider :
- Availability Heuristic — our tendency to use or give more weighting to the most recent information we have available
- Ikea effect — we value something we have personally created a lot more than it is actually worth
- Planning fallacy — You suffer from the Planning Fallacy when you systematically underestimate the time or resource requirements of your projects. Its likely you will even blow past your worst case scenario
- Hyperbolic Discounting — Going for the short term payoff at the expense of a better longer term benefit
- Illusion of competence — we all think we are better than we really are
- Attribution error — the tendency to believe one’s own success is due to ability rather than to surrounding factors, while the success of others is due to their surrounding factors, rather than their personal ability;
- Anchoring — Putting too much weight on the first information received or on a specific piece of information over all others.
- Sunk Cost Fallacy — You suffer from the Sunk Cost Fallacy whenever your decisions are distorted by irretrievable past expenses
Tips to avoid cognitive bias’s in your business and projects :
- Declare your expected outcomes upfront.
- Make declaring outcomes a team activity.
- Emphasize estimation not precision.
- Measure actions versus words.
- Turn your assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses — [Specific testable action] will drive [Expected measurable outcome].
- Time-box your experiments.
- Always use a control group.
My Resources:– Various articles including HBR article — Get Set to Root Out Bias from Your Decision-Making Process and ALSO WATCH THIS GREAT VIDEO on using the cognitive bias’s to make yourself more persuasive
IMAGE CREDIT : Natasha Connell at Unsplash.com
JOE
