Decision Making Biases Part 2 - Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency for people to favour information that confirms their existing beliefs whilst ignoring and filtering out data that contradicts those beliefs.  If we are going to make good decisions it follows that we need to be aware of this bias to consciously avoid falling into its trap.

5 Tips to avoid confirmation bias in decision making

Multiple Perspectives: Seek out diverse perspectives from people who may have different views or experiences.  This can help challenge your pre-existing beliefs and also drive you for a more creative solution.  

Sources: Where does the information come from and why should I trust in?  This is actually one of the big issues we have with students using search engines and limited sourcing for their papers.  I suspect this will also now move onto AI generated work too.  Unless the sources are credible and knowledgeable, don't fall foul of whatever search engine algorithm is being used - and never just take one input, seek several.  It is something which I am hot on in boardroom discussions as I also find that inputs to decision making can be made on general statements as if they were fact.  Leaders ask the right question and one of them should be on the provenance of any information you are provided with.

Challenge: This one takes a certain amount of maturity and an ability to take a step back and look at the big picture before you to challenge your assumptions.  When coaching, I find that people do this better by writing their assumptions down and then listing them in order of weight/risk.  This creates that distance needed to evaluate properly and is doubly useful because it lets the whole team know what importance and level of effort is required to find facts to turn assumptions into known quantities.

Office Culture: What is the office culture where you work.  Can the team ideate and challenge without being ridiculed?  It is up to you to set the standard to allow different viewpoints and ideas flourish from below.  If you have used the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Tool (anyone who has worked with me knows I am a fan of it) and were either very strong on Competing (>75%) or very low on Collaborating (<25%) should look to see if their leadership style may be stifling open discussion.

A second point to think about is how you word your questions with your team.  Are you asking them in a neutral way to ensure that you are not accidently situating the answer that you wish to hear?

Question 4: Anyone who has been through staff training in the UK military, will recognise the phrase "Question 4."  It refers to a question you should be asking all the time. "what's changed" and therefore are my assumptions which my decision was based on still valid? A great example of this could be once you have done say a stakeholder analysis for a change plan.  Stakeholder opinions fluctuate, stay alive to that and through application, you will have a more nuanced understanding of the issues impacting your plan and from which to decide what to do next to support it.  For a good example of issues of stakeholder management in a crises, read Melissa Agness' article from Forbes: "What Samsung did wrong when responding to the Galaxy Note 7 disaster". Part of the issue of their response could be seen as confirmation bias because of their pre-existing belief that their phones could not be effected.

2 mini case studies:

The Challenger Disaster: The decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was partially driven by confirmation bias. The Rogers Commission noted that the engineers at NASA had discussed the know O-ring problem in a teleconference the night before however did not include all the data.  The flights with zero incidents were excluded from the plot by the engineers because it was felt that these flights did not contribute any information about the temperature effect.  The Rogers Commission therefore concluded:  “A careful analysis of the flight history of O-ring performance would have revealed the correlation of O-ring damage in low temperature”. For a more complete study of the Challenger Disaster read this entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica

German electrical company RWE spent some €10 billion in large capital investments in conventional power and were caught out by political and public turnaround of sentiment away from conventional to renewable power generation.  In an informative article from McKinsey Quarterly, read this interview with the CFO Bernhard Günther about the issue of biases in their decision making which drove a complete overhaul.

5  Team Exercises for Your Use

If you want to do some quick workshop activities to expose your team to the issues of confirmation bias and to learn from it, try these:

The Newspaper Exercise: Give each team member a different newspaper article about a controversial topic. Ask them to read and summarise their article to the group, then ask the team to identify any biases or assumptions in the articles. This exercise can help teams recognise the different perspectives and biases that can exist around a single topic.

The Devil's Advocate Exercise: Divide the team into two groups. One group will argue in favour of a particular decision or point of view, while the other group will take the opposite stance. Ask each group to present their arguments to the other, and encourage them to challenge each other's assumptions and biases. This exercise can help teams recognise their own biases and develop more well-rounded perspectives.

The Blindspot Exercise: Ask each team member to write down their own biases or assumptions on a piece of paper and fold it up. Collect all the papers and redistribute them randomly. Each team member will then read aloud the bias or assumption on the paper they received, and the group will discuss how it might impact decision-making. This exercise can help teams recognise and acknowledge their own biases, as well as the biases of their colleagues.

Guest Speaker: Invite a guest speaker who has a different perspective or background than the team to speak about a topic related to the team's work. Encourage the team to ask questions and engage in a dialogue with the speaker, and challenge their own assumptions and biases in the process. This exercise can help teams broaden their perspectives and recognise the value of diverse viewpoints. It is standard stuff in our MBA program to help broaden our students culturally and also develop critical thinking skills in a face paced setting during Q&A.

The Red Team Exercise: Assign a small group within the team to act as a "red team" - a group responsible for identifying flaws and weaknesses in the team's decision-making process. Encourage the red team to challenge the assumptions and biases of the larger team, and provide feedback on ways to improve decision-making. This exercise can help teams recognise their own blind spots and develop more rigorous decision-making processes.  It is also a very good exercise to use when drawing up resilience plans and I used it extensively in the military.  Get your red team to throw everything they can come up with at you.  This will expose any flaws in your initial plan and force you to think of risk mitigation branch plans to make your continuity plan more robust.

Conclusion

As a leader, it is important that you are aware of your own biases and that of your team. Make use of the mini exercises and read the case studies to further develop your understanding of it and by doing so, you should be better placed to make better decisions without this negative bias influencing you.

In the third and final part of this mini series on decision making biases, we shall look at Anchoring Bias. Go here for Part 1 in the series on Overconfidence