You are alone sitting in a carriage on a train late at night. You are tired, but try to stay awake. The graffiti offer a mild distraction, but you’ve read it all before, nothing new. Your laptop bag is on the seat next to you wobbling slightly as it tries to stay upright on the torn seat and with the rocking of the train. The rhythmic motion makes it hard to keep your eyes open. The train pulls into a deserted-looking station and a gang of drunken men step into your carriage. Alert, but trying not to sit bolt upright looking nervous, you quietly pick up your laptop bag, open it and look busy rummaging purposefully for goodness knows what.
You carry on this charade until the train pulls into the next station and you get off. This isn’t your stop, but better safe than sorry.
You have never experienced any kind of trouble on a train, but the media often reports the most emotion-fueled crimes it can muster to burn into our memories warnings of foreboding. The media are just doing their job, and while it’s important that they report events as factually as possible, by using emotion-fueled words they create more impactful and memorable messages. To a certain extent, this is what I am doing here. We all do it. It’s how we remember information, some of which is highly important for our safety and development.
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When we make any decisions we rely on our own experiences together with what we remember from reported experiences of others. We go through a reasoning process, form a belief and next look for evidence to support that belief, this is known as confirmation bias. The problem is, we do not consider all relevant information because we are exposed to a cacophony of stimuli all the time and we need to make mental shortcuts to work things out. These shortcuts are called heuristics, whereby we pick what we perceive as a few relevant factors and make what we think is a reasonable decision. This is a flawed system, as we may have based our decision on incorrect or incomplete information and this leads to cognitive biases.
Basically, in our need to make fast decisions (e.g. do you get off the train at the next stop) and avoid being overwhelmed with too much data (drunk doesn’t mean harmful/they look decent/some alcohol makes people more aggressive than others/they may fall asleep/they may vomit/they may get off at the next stop/you saw a security person in the next carriage…..), you make the decision based upon your cognitive biases for expediency.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, after all on the whole we are good at making decisions. However, cognitive bias is something we all need to be aware of when making business decisions.
For instance, if you have a reliable member of staff whom you trust, it is perfectly normal and reasonable to go to that person when you need information and their point of view. If what they say confirms what you thought anyway, it is normal for you to look no further before finalising your decision.
This approach is often to be found but could cause a major problem and highlights why we must avoid surrounding ourselves with yes-men and sycophants and, on the contrary, encourage a culture of speaking out. We need people who have opposing points of view to challenge our cognitive biases, so that we look for and obtain further evidence, either positive or negative, consider all angles carefully and then make the necessary decision.
We automatically use heuristics, we have to. But may I suggest that for those big decisions, you are conscious of your cognitive and confirmation biases and adjust your thinking and actions accordingly. Your management skills will be truly enhanced.
