If the aim is to learn from experience-mistakes as well as successes-acknowledging that process is crucial.īet on process rather than luck or inspiration.Ī focus on outcomes can also influence our sense of ethics. But the details of the decision process, which we can control far more than the result, typically don’t catch our attention. In the business environment, the outcomes of decisions are highly visible, readily available for us to observe and judge. We also consider techniques for overcoming those biases. ![]() Distilling a wide range of research on the subject, we focus in this article on the biases that result from three types of filters: the business environment, which favors the observation of outcomes (especially successes) over the processes that lead to them our circle of advisers, who may be censoring the information they share with us and our own limited reasoning abilities. If our goal is to improve decision making, we can use our knowledge of those filters to understand just what our experience has to teach us. Even so, we persist in believing that we have gleaned the correct insights from our own experience and from the accounts of other people. As a result, our interpretations of experience are biased, and the judgments and decisions we base on those interpretations can be misguided. The problem is that we view the past through numerous filters that distort our perceptions. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.Įxperience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser. We interpret the past-what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told-to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. ![]() We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We can base our decisions on a clearer view of the world if we focus not just on outcomes but on the processes that lead to them learn from near misses encourage disagreement and the search for disconfirming evidence and broaden our perspective. As a consequence, our experiences fool us instead of making us wiser. We view our experience through multiple filters that distort reality, limiting our ability to figure out what’s actually going on around us. ![]() As we make decisions, we rely on our experience and on what advisers and confidants tell us about theirs. We can base our decisions on a clearer view of the world if we study failures and near misses-especially the processes behind them encourage all employees to pursue preventive measures instead of just solving problems surround ourselves with people who will speak frankly search for evidence that our hunches are wrong, and encourage employees, data scientists, and consultants to do the same and broaden our perspective in order to give new meaning to our varied experiences.Įxperience: We think of it as our guide, a reliable source of insight and the foundation of our expertise. We tend to focus on evidence that confirms our beliefs and gloss over information that contradicts them, and we read too much into our personal experience, which inevitably involves a small sample of incidents. ![]() A third filter is our own limited reasoning abilities. Another is our circle of advisers, who may censor the information they share with us. One filter is the business environment, which focuses on outcomes rather than the processes that lead to them and celebrates successes while ignoring failures, thus making it hard for us to learn from mistakes. The problem is that we view the past through filters that distort reality. It seems like a reasonable approach, but it could be a mistake. We interpret the past-what we’ve experienced and what we’ve been told-to chart a course for the future.
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