Cognitive Bias: Groupthink & Organizational Challenges - The Science of Red Team Thinking

A Cognitive Bias is a mental shortcut that can covertly influence decisions. We like to think that we make decisions analytically and impartially. In fact, most of our decision-making processes fly under the radar of our conscious awareness. Gaining awareness of theses biases is an important step to overcoming them. Organizations are also prone to irrationality in their decision-making processes. These tendencies often become deeply ingrained in their?culture, making them difficult to isolate and stamp out. ?

How Red Team Thinking?helps: Biases and Blind Spots

"One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him" ~ Thomas Schelling,?Nobel Prize-winning economist

No matter how smart we are, no matter how well-educated we are, no matter how experienced or successful we are, we all fall victim to a dizzying array of cognitive biases and mental blind spots that influence our?thinking and?skew our?decision-making.?By being aware of these blind spots and mental shortcuts, we can understand the ways in which they shape our decisions and take steps to ensure that our strategies and plans are not unduly influenced by them.

Let me ideate on all our Potential Biases one by one - there are about 25 classified Biases and let me deal with these one by one through a series of LinkedIn Posts:

No. 1: ?Affect Heuristic:?The tendency to make decisions based on strong emotions, rather than objective data. Positive emotions can blind us to troubling statistics, a fact which explains the success of cigarette advertising. Negative emotions can skew our perceptions even more strongly.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, for example, found that in the months following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, Americans were less likely to travel by plane and more likely to travel by car than they had been before the attacks. As a result, highway deaths increased substantially in the United States, because even with the threat of terrorism factored in, the odds of dying in a car crash are substantially higher than the odds of dying in a plane crash.

In fact, Gigerenzer’s analysis showed that?more?people were killed because they chose not to fly in the months following 9/11 than were killed in the terrorist attacks that day. Business decisions can also be swayed by strong emotions. Just think about all of the companies that overpaid for tech acquisitions in the late 1990s when business leaders were high on the irrational exuberance of the dot-com boom. One of the most costly examples was the 2000 acquisition of Lycos by the Spanish telecommunications company Terra Networks, which paid a whopping $12.5 billion for the Internet search engine. Already an also-ran in that space, Lycos soon faded into oblivion and was sold four years later to Korean Internet firm Daum for just $95.4 million. Daum sold Lycos six years after that to India’s Ybrant Digital for $36 million.

Red Team Thinking?guards against the affect heuristic by helping you consider?strategies and plans objectively, rather than emotionally.

No. 2: ?Anchoring Bias:?To be Continued in next Post....