Picture the self-confident leader taking and making difficult and “hairy “decisions in their stride. Their vast experience supporting their excellent judgment helping them navigate successfully in a volatile and ever changing business context. You will be familiar with the concept of biases swaying decision making. So do people with good judgment leaders we might like to call rational decision makers have fewer biases or are they more aware of them and can overcome them somehow?
Well not according to research by psychologist Daniel Kahneman who has been looking at decision making for the last 50 years. Kahneman believes that our judgments are as a result of something called “heuristic” or mental rules of thumb that provide us with rough and ready answers to our problems. So why might this be important well it seems we have a bias for the quick and casual explanation which might serve us well most of the time but in novel situations can and often does lead our thinking astray. It may be another brain attempt at increasing efficiency through hardwiring our thinking, something of great interest to learners and leadership developers alike.
Let me give you a simple example of different thinking in the form of a puzzle:
A baseball bat and ball cost $1.10. The Bat cost $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Most people will answer 10c. But this is the wrong answer” a 10 c ball plus $1.10 bat comes to $1.20. To work out the answer we need to slow down override our hardwiring and engage our pre-frontal cortex in order to work it out. The answer if you are still sweating is 5c.
So to override our rules of thumb” we have to pay attention or have “focused attention” as the neuroscientists would call it. Kahneman distinguishes between 2 types of thinking the intuitive and the deliberate or of you like the fast and the slow.
The intuitive is fast, automatic and effortless and our thinking arises as feelings or fully fledged convictions. The Deliberate is slow and where we are in a conscious start paying attention and it where we deliberate reflect and think. Kahn labels the Slow deliberate way of thinking the “lazy controller” i.e. it can take control but usually doesnt and abides by the rule of least effort.
So what we consider to be rational thinking may not be what it appears our tendency to see patterns like faces in the mountains of Mars or are tendency to see causal relations in random events do question what reality is anyway?
Two things I take out of this. Firstly leaders need to be aware of the bias of their perceptions and ways of thinking so they can veto their intuition. This is in my view emerging as good leadership skills
Secondly leaders to be effective decision makers in changing times have to learn to be sceptical , learn when to take time to reflect, to weight up the evidence to not necessarily be seduced by everyone elses mental “rule of thumb” and have the confidence to back their deliberate judgement.
Graham Hart is a writer and long time practitioner in human development and writes for Leopard learning. if you are interested in learning more about brain based learning approaches then feel free to check out brain based learning