Make better product decisions by protecting yourself against these biases
Let’s test your creativity. Answer this: Have you ever used a basketball to carry water?
Huh!? Can not compute.
The creative solution is when you deflate the basketball and form it into the shape of a bowl.
You didn’t think of that? Can’t blame you. We all suffer from a classic cognitive bias called functional fixedness. It’s when think about using a known object only for the function it is traditionally used. Biases like functional fixedness hold us back from innovation and creativity.
We are confronted with many of these biases. I remind myself of them for the purpose of making better product decisions. Decisions that are sometimes based on observed behavior or long established patterns. The only too familiar phrase: “We have always done it this way.”
The reason: when we make decisions, our brains take shortcuts. We repeat certain behaviors and they become automated responses. This helps us to make faster decisions and save our brain’s energy. In many parts of our life speed is more valuable than precision and we learn to rely on our brain’s quick interpretation and reaction. Most of the time we benefit from this trained behavior. We use common patterns to solve problems. We call these biases.
To innovate, we need to overcome these very biases that helped us get here in the first place!
Learn to identify them
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman focuses on behavioral science and as one topic it talks about are concepts that create biases.
My process is:
Step 1: Understand where they are coming from.
Step 2: Recognize them when they happen.
Step 3: Avoid flawed decisions based on misleading biases.
There are hundreds of them, but let’s start with four important ones and how to overcome them to immediately enhance your creativity and decision-making.
Biases that limit creative thinking
Functional Fixedness
When I was 6 years old my cousin and I threw a blanket on the grass in my backyard, grabbed two wooden sticks, sat down next to each other on the blanked and started to paddle towards the ocean. The blanket was our boat, the grass was a streaming river and the sticks were our paddles. Here is an interesting post about this concept.
It would take kids only a few seconds to jump on our blanket to join our journey. As we grow older, we learn to think about structures and objects the way they are. It gets harder to imagine that a simple stick would serve as a paddle. Psychology calls it functional fixedness. And that is one reason why we struggle when trying to find breakthrough product ideas.
It is this classic saying — “Think outside the box”. Break down functionalities of the objects or try to apply known objects to solve different problems then they are. Check out this Brain Game Video:
Authority Bias
We often listen to experts in a field to learn from their experiences. This is another useful trait for survival of the species. We learn from their mistakes to avoid them. It is however, a limiting factor for innovation and creative thinking.
Authorities are often senior members in our team or experts in the field with 20 years of experience. If we are looking to innovate, we need to bring everyone into the conversation. We should not per default tend to the expert opinion.
Unnecessary constraints
Have you done the 9 dots problem? If yes, skip this part. If not, read on.
Take a pen and without lifting the pen, draw 4 straight lines that pass through each dot only once.
Another cognitive bias.
If you have done this before you might remember that the solution is to extend your lines outside the box. Crazy simple… nobody told you that you are constrained by the borders of the grid. Remember when I wrote before “Think outside the box”? You could have done that here.
The interesting solution to this problem is…not very conventional. Two Australian scientists found in 2013 that we can stimulate the exact part of the brain that we need to solve the puzzle. By using a shower cap to send short electrical impulses to the brain. The result was that 40% of the people that couldn’t solve it before, suddenly found the solution. Bring one of these caps to your next brainstorming session and you might just invent the next big thing.
And if anyone out there knows where to get these shower caps, let me know in the comments. If not, time to start a new business.
Conformity Bias
When we see others make decisions, we get influenced by it. We love to check yelp, amazon and other sites for reviews. We do it to evaluate the products and food we are planning to purchase. It is a very reasonable thing to do. However, looking at outside opinions for creative ideas and solutions can suppress our own thoughts and ideas. Group-thinking holds back the creativity of individuals.
We do need to look at competitors. We need to know what they do and how they solve problems for users. Next time you are inclined to do so, explore on your own first. Spend 30 minutes and make a list of ideas that you can come up with. Then compare. You might come up with a much better solution.
Now you know some of the internal barriers for our creative thoughts. I try to keep them in mind and switch them off when I need to. There are many more biases out there. If you want to learn more about how and why our brain applies these, I recommend the book mentioned above “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
A great way to overcome biases in your organization is to host Hackdays.
Everyone joins in to solve known customer problems. All brains come together and you might just find a variety of solutions to these problems. It’s a lot of fun and you will be surprised what people come up with in 24 hours crunch time.
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