How to Prevent Cognitive Bias from Ruining your Business

https://StrategicLeadersAcademy.com How to Prevent Cognitive Bias from Ruining your Business Cognitive bias is one of the biggest decision-making challenges, especially when companies face intense competition. Cognitive bias is the tendency to place excessive weight on data that confirms a pre-existing point of view and to discount disconfirming data. These problems result in leaders holding an increasingly inaccurate picture of the marketplace. Their decisions – and frustrations -- grow worse over time as the gulf between expectations and results widens. This is exactly what happened to the Germans during the Normandy campaign. I’m standing at Longues sur Mer, where the allied armada was spotted streaming toward the beaches on D-Day. The Germans were convinced that D-Day was a secondary attack. The main attack, they believed, would be led by General Patton at Calais. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, the Germans clung stubbornly to their beliefs about Calais for a full two months, which tied down large numbers of forces that could have contested the Normandy landings. It was not until Patton’s 3rd Army was thrashing the rear areas of their forces that the Germans finally realized they’d been fooled. One of the best ways to prevent cognitive bias is to maintain two or three alternative diagnoses of the marketplace situation. Use the data points to check the veracity of the primary and alternative diagnoses. This will help you shift your diagnosis more quickly, if needed, and will improve the quality of your decisions. If you would like to learn more about common decision making errors and how to prevent them, join our membership program at Strategic Leaders Academy dot com.