Outsmart Your Own Biases
Highlights
- Because most of us tend to be highly overconfident in our estimates, it's important to "nudge" ourselves to allow for risk and uncertainty (View Highlight)
- To improve your accuracy, work up at least three estimates -- low, medium, and high -- instead of just stating a range. People give wider ranges when they think about their low and high estimates separately, and coming up with three numbers prompts you to do that. (View Highlight)
- Project an outcome, take a break (sleep on it if you can), and then come back and project another. Don't refer to your previous estimate -- you'll only anchor yourself and limit your ability to achieve new insights. If you can't avoid thinking about your previous estimate, then assume it was wrong and consider reasons that support a different guess. (View Highlight)
- In a premortem, you imagine a future failure and then explain the cause. This technique, also called prospective hindsight, helps you identify potential problems that ordinary foresight won't bring to mind. (View Highlight)
- An outside view also prevents the "planning fallacy" -- spinning a narrative of total success and managing for that, even though your odds of failure are actually pretty high (View Highlight)
- Early in the decision-making process, you want to generate many objectives. Later you can sort out which ones matter most (View Highlight)
- looking at objectives one by one rather than all at once helps people come up with more alternatives. Seeking a solution that checks off every single box is too difficult -- it paralyzes the decision maker. (View Highlight)
- Even System 2 thinking is often too narrow. Analyzing the pros and cons of several options won't do you any good if you've failed to identify the best ones. (View Highlight)
- Use joint evaluation. The problem with evaluating options in isolation is that you can't ensure the best outcomes (View Highlight)
- Assume you can't choose any of the options you're weighing and ask, "What else could I do?" This question will trigger an exploration of alternatives (View Highlight)
- All these cognitive biases -- narrow thinking about the future, about objectives, and about options -- are said to be "motivated" when driven by an intense psychological need, such as a strong emotional attachment or investment. Motivated biases are especially difficult to overcome (View Highlight)
- We're overconfident for two reasons: We give the information we do have too much weight (see the sidebar "How to Prevent Misweighting"). And because we don't know what we can't see, we have trouble imagining other ways of framing the problem or working toward a solution. (View Highlight)
- we can preempt some motivated biases, such as the tendency to doggedly pursue a course of action we desperately want to take, by using a "trip wire" to redirect ourselves to a more logical path (View Highlight)
- Make your trip wire precise (name a date) so that you'll find it harder to disregard later, and share it with people who will hold you accountable. (View Highlight)
- As a rule of thumb, it's good to anticipate three possible futures, establish three key objectives, and generate three viable options for each decision scenario. We can always do more, of course, but this general approach will keep us from feeling over-whelmed by endless possibilities -- which can be every bit as debilitating as seeing too few. (View Highlight)