Next up in Q&R’s The Big Question, in which we ask leaders in the communications sector to answer one big question, we interviewed Trudy Stripp – Business Consultant specialising in Change management, Marketing and Brand management, Business development and Operations.
Trudy started working life at a national newspaper, then brought her expertise to the construction industry via headhunting, an ad agency, and the event technology arena. Trudy uses her knowledge of the way organisations interact with their internal and external stakeholders to help them maximise opportunities to be better. Her skill at identifying stumbling blocks, bringing people with her and creating workable, creative solutions are her superpower.
When not untangling knotty business issues, she buys and sells precious stones, enjoys scuba diving and is an active Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.
Trudy says: I love this……..but then I am biased
We‘ve all heard the line ‘I love this ….., but then I am biased,’ but when we don’t recognise our personal biases, we can put ourselves and our companies at a disadvantage, and when the economy is in a state of turmoil every decision counts.
Generally, we all know of the bias of recruiting in your image (often cited as the reason that company boards tend to be full of older white males,). We actively seek to redress the race/ gender/age/sexuality biases. Still, biases are usually unconscious, and by acknowledging them, understanding them and actively working against your biases great things can happen.
So how do these biases show themselves?
If you have ever found yourself trying to defend a previous process, or course of action that has become outdated but seems to kind of work, or evaluated a proposal based on who has made it, rather than the pros and cons of the proposal itself, then you are being biased.
So what are some of the main biases? Well, there are quite a few, but in business, they mainly fall into 2 categories-
People biases
- Representativeness – They look like the rest of the board, so they will do well because the current board do.
- Stereotyping – assuming large groups of people have the same attributes ie education, hard work, skill set etc.
- Champion bias – they have been successful previously, therefore they must be correct now.
- Confirmation bias – selectively searching for evidence which confirms your current beliefs.
Financial biases
- Partition dependence – tendency to distribute resources evenly, rather than by what will bring the greatest return.
- Planning fallacy – believing the optimistic, best-case scenario, rather than a realistic one which may be harder to sell to others.
- Loss aversion – continuing doing something the same way because change will be risky, but could bring much greater rewards..
- Sunk cost fallacy – we’ve already spent £x on the new IT system, which does kind of work, but we can’t bin it now because it’s cost so much – (Horizon IT scandal anyone?)
- Status Quo bias – a preference for current circumstances even when change would be advantageous (ie changing a mobile phone contract.)
How do we overcome these biases?
There are three main strategies for debiasing – motivational, cognitive and technological.
Motivational – increasing accountability and using incentives.
If you have to explain your decision to others it can make you more aware of your biases, because generally people want to avoid embarrassment and impress others, and people are more likely to reflect and use appropriate decision-making if they are motivated to do so. Though this does rely on people already possessing the appropriate decision-making techniques, it can be used for example to reward accuracy, not just speed.
Cognitive – Don’t assume that people already have the tools they need, instead provide people with the techniques they need to arrive at more rational decisions.
Ask yourself ‘What are some of the reasons that my initial judgement might be wrong?’ – play devil’s advocate. To combat over-optimism and planning fallacy on projects take an outside view – how long and what was the cost others have taken to get this done?
Engage in training to help staff use more reliable methods of decision-making.
Lastly – do a pre-mortem – identify potential causes of failure in the planning stages, and do you can eliminate them or mitigate them as you go.
Technical strategies – use groups of people to decide, and then individuals’ biases can be mitigated and challenged.
By dividing complex problems into a greater number of simpler ones you can combine those answers to conclude. This is particularly useful in recruiting and can be automated.
In conclusion, debiasing requires intervention, but by doing things like considering the opposite, taking the outside view and having group discussions, we may not be able to get rid of biases completely, but by mitigating them we could make better decisions, and surely it’s worth a try.