Get over yourself: tackle decision bias

We are all flawed when it comes to making decisions. Like it or not, people are intuitively pretty crappy decision-makers. We often can't see outside our frame of reference, are riddled with biases and assumptions, are poor statisticians, and overestimate our judgement.

Worse, we treat decision-making as though it's a God-given talent. We promote and elect based on "good judgement" and reinforce that making good decisions is innate rather than a skill we must work on.

We form our opinions and make decisions based on various influences—some we know about, some we don't. A lot of the time, that's OK—in fact, it's often desirable! especially for low-level, repeatable decisions in areas in which we have plenty of knowledge.

We don't need frameworks, super-skills, or defined processes in those situations. We make the most of our internal personal assistant (how I think of our intuition) and move on. However, the internal PA can become troublesome when something changes, when the stakes are high, the pressure is on, or the topic is unfamiliar—or a combination of these things.

We form our points of view from a wild and eclectic mix of influences—few of which we are cognisant of. Why? We have a very powerful innate preference for things that make sense, and we tend to ignore or downplay things that don't.

The good news is that, with a bit of poke and some honest reflection, we can challenge our ideas and perspectives as we make decisions.

This was a helpful exercise recently for Councillors and senior managers in a Council in the lower South Island. The workshop brief sought a clear path forward for a stalled community project with an extended community, organisational, and political history. (Read: baggage.)

After some open and honest conversations, we realised that some powerful assumptions, peer group influences, and personal experiences clouded how our decision-makers approached the future of this facility.

Thankfully, acknowledging these influences together greatly impacted the rest of our workshop. By calling out the elephants in the room, stakeholders were able to interact more openly and constructively.

Participants challenged each other with statements like, "But how do we know what the community thinks?" or "Are we just assuming that?"

The trick is to get ourselves and find comfort in being fallible. This is particularly powerful in a group setting like the one above because it grants collective permission to challenge each other's views from a place of respect and mutual bias without fear of things becoming personal.

How to get over yourself

For beginners

• Include a 'gaps and assumptions' section on your meeting agenda or report templates.

• Run Assumption Buster workshops for critical projects and policy decisions.

For high-achievers

• Book senior executives and decision-makers for decision leadership coaching to boost bias awareness.

• Design idiot-proofed decision frameworks to build bias detection into all significant decisions.