Previously serving in Deloitte’s Talent organization, since 2014 she’s been coaching leaders and teams in creating cultures that enable each member to thrive and make their best contribution. Suz is a social-personality psychologist and a leading practitioner of Deloitte’s Business Chemistry, which she uses to guide clients as they explore how their work is shaped by the mix of individuals who make up a team. The post that follows tackles this issue.ĭr. And yet, taking advantage of this diversity is actually a bit more complicated than simply having one of each type represented on a team. Being competitive and open to calculated risk, Drivers are likely to push for less conservative estimates, forecasts, and predictions, minimizing the prudence trap.Īgain we're seeing the potential power of diverse teams, like we did in my last post The Power of Opposites.Integrators are likely to solicit estimates, forecasts, and predictions from a broader group, which may increase accuracy and mitigate the overconfidence trap.Systematic and exhaustive in their search for information, Guardians can help create a more complete picture of a situation, helping to avoid the confirming-evidence trap.Pioneers seek novelty and change and may be able to pull us away from the status quo trap. In fact, actively tapping into the particular perspectives of each Business Chemistry type could help a team minimize quite a few of them. But on a diverse team, varied approaches to decision-making can mean we're not all equally likely to fall into each of these traps. It's not easy to avoid these biases, particularly because they're often at work without us realizing it. For more, check out the spotlight on decision-making in the May 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review. There are many more and there has been much written about them recently. These are just a few of the decision-making traps that confound us. For example, a market research team may be reviewing focus group transcripts and highlighting all the quotes that show support for the product in question (which they happen to think is great), while missing entirely a whole slew of quotes that suggest the product will be a flop. And then the production team uses those doubly downgraded estimates to determine how much product to make, and as a result, they don't make enough to meet actual sales for the quarter.Īnd let's not forget the confirming-evidence trap, which causes us to notice, seek, and pay attention to information that supports what we already believe, while missing, not seeking, or ignoring contradictory information. And then his manager might combine the whole department's estimates, and then downgrade them slightly to make sure she meets expectations. So an individual might downgrade his sales estimate for next quarter to make sure he meets expectations. Then there's the prudence trap, which leads us to adjust our estimates, forecasts, and predictions to be “on the safe side," but then fail to share those adjustments with others, who take them at face value and base their decisions on them (or even add to the problem by making their own “safe-side" adjustments). This happens a lot in project planning, where teams tend to overestimate how smoothly things will go and underestimate how long things will take, how many things will go wrong, and how much it will all cost. There's also the overconfidence trap, by which we're inclined to think our estimates, forecasts, and predictions are more accurate than they actually are-and then we base our decisions on them. I've written about some of them before, like the unconscious categorizing our brains automatically do, and the status quo trap, which is defined by a tendency toward making decisions that keep things the way they are rather than opening ourselves to action and change. And there's a seemingly endless list of them. And combining these approaches-making decisions in a diverse team-can be a great way to combat some of the cognitive biases, or decision-making traps, that sometimes lead us to make faulty decisions.Ĭognitive biases are hard-wired ways of thinking that we're often unaware of, and that impact our decision-making and can cause us to make errors in judgment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |