Dealing with Bias in the Workplace

A journalist I respect posted something a day ago about how O’ level questions are framed in different climes and it made me think about objectivity. In the search for inclusion in the workplace, we constantly frame objectivity as Holy Writ, but is it achievable? How can we ensure objectivity in our dealings, especially in the current global workspace where we deal with colleagues, partners and stakeholders across various geolocations and varying cultural backgrounds? How do we eliminate our inherent biases?

I did a course recently on Taming Bias and it came as a shock to me that humans exhibit about 200 known biases. I had written an article earlier this year on dealing with the Imposter Syndrome, and even though I had included a footnote on the opposite extreme of this syndrome (the Duning-Kruger effect), I realized during the course that I had exhibited that very bias by assuming very confidently at the start that humans possibly couldn’t exhibit more than 20 biases.

A bias is a disproportionate weight in favour or disfavour of an idea. When there is no available baseline for an estimate, we often anchor on what seems most probable given the available information. Bias is an evolutionary influence on our ability to interpret life and make decisions, that enables us to do both faster.

Bias comes in different ways to human beings. We have biases in how we interpret what we see (Optical bias), in how we relate to events (Cultural bias) and in how we think (Cognitive bias). It is important to note that biases are not inherently bad. The biases we exhibit every day as humans are a primitive brain technique adapted to help us decide faster in a dangerous world. When it’s night and you are an Australopithecus africanus crawling through the bush, you don’t want to waste time investigating the snapping sound you just heard to determine if it’s a Tyrannosaurus rex or a falling branch, your mind makes a quick decision and you move! That’s a bias.

If we must be inclusive and objective in our increasingly diverse world, we must learn to tame our biases. I want to try in this article to share how we can tame our biases when dealing with our teams in the workplace.

Identify your bias

Awareness is the state of being cognizant of events, of knowing and perceiving. It is the first step towards growth or change or improvement. By becoming aware of your propensity to be biased, you can start to take steps to untangle your bias. Start by reviewing a list of biases, (you can find some within the links I reference below or by carrying out a simple internet search). Then you need to ask yourself several questions, probe your responses to various stimuli and the ways you carry out decisions in varying events. By probing the reasons behind the thinking that supported your decisions, you may determine what biases you have.

Expose your bias

The objective of this exercise is to improve your objectivity, declaring your assets or conflicts of interest, if you will. By exposing your bias to your team, you ensure accountability in measuring your decisions for bias before you make them. Then you can truly begin to untangle your reliance on these biases when making your decisions.

Defeat your bias

To trick to eliminating bias is engagement. In the previous illustration, the caveman can only make an objective decision on go-no-go if he decides to investigate the rustling sound in the bush. When dealing with teams of people, you can only truly be unbiased if your decisions are made after rigorous engagement with the teams. Stop making your decisions based off a bell-curve chart and actually go out and speak to people.

Things to watch out for:

• Artificial Intelligence: There is a school of thought that believes that decisions are cleaner and more objective when they are made by automated machine tools. “The AI is cognizant of the situation and not limited by any human emotions or biases” and other stories. This philosophy does not consider that AI is machined, programmed, by learning models based on human input. The recent “Delve-gate” with Paul Graham v. Nigerian Twitter comes to mind. Don’t be drawn into a situation where you hand over decision making to AI, you would end up falling for any one of these biases: Technology Overtrust or Automation Bias.

• Sometimes our need for community, to identify or belong to a group, causes us to unwittingly bias our thinking. Eg. The colour of your skin influencing your political views or your religion influencing your preference for a candidate etc. A quick check is, “what do the facts say?”. Let facts always take precedence over your preferences or even your need to be correct.

By identifying what our biases are and taking concrete actionable steps to challenge and then tackle them, we will make ourselves better teammates and managers of people. We will also make better decisions that impact on our organizations more profitably long-term.

Let me know what you think about this and if you have had any challenges with dealing with your bias or the bias of a team member in the past. How did you sort through it and solve the problem?

References

24 cognitive biases that could affect how you see the world | World Economic Forum ( weforum.org )

https://wickedproblemsolver.com/bias

https://x.com/DavidHundeyin/status/1782738806329770091

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