A cognitive bias is a bit like cholesterol: everyone knows it exists, but nobody thinks it applies to them. Of course, it is always someone or something else that is biased.
The colleague who “doesn’t understand the strategy”.
The market that “reacts irrationally”.
The teams that “resist change”.
In short, the mote and the beam: it’s always someone else’s bias.
Biases share one striking characteristic: they seem to affect people who are less intelligent, less experienced or less clear-sighted than we are. At least, that is what we all tend to think. And that is precisely where the problem begins.
Seasoned and successful leaders are particularly susceptible to this issue. They carry their professional success as a banner, regarding it as visible proof that their judgement cannot be questioned. Yet they are not immune to bias.
Take the one that comes with experience, for example: after a long career, it is easy to mistake intuition for truth and to apply yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. Then there is the status effect: the higher people rise in the hierarchy, the less likely others are to challenge them, not because leaders are always right, but because the social cost of disagreement increases. Add consistency bias to the mix: the longer a decision has been defended with conviction, the more psychologically and professionally costly it becomes to acknowledge its flaws.
Yet these cognitive mechanisms are more than simple lapses in judgement. They are also an expression of our decision-making instinct: mental shortcuts that enable us to act in the face of uncertainty. Their usefulness is undeniable. Their danger emerges when instinct mistakes itself for clarity.
The question is therefore not: “How can we avoid bias?”
But rather: “How can we design systems that compensate for it?”
A few simple remedies do exist: encouraging challenge rather than merely tolerating it (or dismissing it through the classic practice of ‘bad labelling’); bringing in external perspectives; and building in moments of deliberate reflection before important decisions.
In short, building into our organisations what the ego rarely does on its own.
Managerial wisdom begins the day we realise that biases do not disappear with experience, or even with professional success. They simply become more sophisticated.
And while we focus on spotting the mote in the neighbor’s eye, we sometimes fail to notice the strategic beam taking root in our own.
