Better together: how organisations can help us mitigate our shortcomings
Mistakes are human. As well as missing the deadline, setting unrealistic goals and being biased while making critical decisions. The article by Chip Heath , Richard P. Larrick and Joshua Klayman contemplates on individual shortcomings and the practices organisations can introduce to compensate for them. Here’s the short review of the article.
People are quite often biased in their decision making processes and tend to make mistakes on important decisions. But organisations, as scientists believe, can provide them with norms and procedures that mitigate their limitations and reduce their shortcomings.
There are two classes of organisational repairs:
- motivational repairs that increase the enthusiasm with which individuals pursue a task;
- cognitive repairs that improve the mental procedures individuals use to decide which task to pursue and how to pursue it
Although the importance of motivational repairs is undoubtful, even when individuals have the right incentives and resources, they may not learn from the experiences if they use the wrong mental processes.
The researchers distinguish 3 stages of the learning and decision making process: hypotheses generation; information collection to distinguish among hypotheses; appropriate and cautious conclusions’ drawing
Researchers differentiate cognitive shortcomings specific to each of the three stages and give real life examples of repairs companies use to mitigate them.
During the generation of hypotheses individuals are prone to such cognitive shortcomings:
- Individuals create hypotheses that are shallow:
- they search for explanations that make themselves look good.
What can be done?
a) compact phrase prompts (e.g. “Don’t confuse brains and a bull market” used by traders on Wall Street);
b) ask employees questions on how did they achieve successful results, as quite often they occurred because of pure luck can not be repeated.
- they focus on people rather than situations (when we think why some event occurred, we tend to think that some other person caused it);
What can be done?
a) prompt employees to search for the cause of events in the system, and not in the individuals.
- they stop searching as soon as they generate one hypothesis (when we have one good hypothesis in mind, it often blocks our ability to see alternatives).
What can be done?
a) Toyota employees are encouraged to ask “why” five times before they stop generating hypotheses;
b) foster the culture that relies on relentless questioning (as the culture in Microsoft).
2. Individuals generate hypothesis that are narrow rather than broad. Even when we generate alternative hypotheses, they often differ only slightly form one another and all lie within the same general frame.
What can be done?
a) at Sharp employees are asked to be “dragonflies”, as they have compound eyes and see things from multiple perspective at once;
b) when Motorola forms cross-functional teams to evaluate new products, they do not employees who have participated in one product team to participate in another team with a similar product.
The most common cognitive shortcomings during the stage of information collection are:
- Individuals often collect small samples of information because they systematically underestimate the benefits of larger samples. We may not collect any information from the environment becuse they believe that there’s already enough information stored in their head.
What can be done?
a) encourage employees to collect rather samples and provide them with tools that help them collect and analyse the data.
2. Individuals collect biased samples of information because the information is easily available in memory:
- we collect biased information based on our preexisting theories;
- we consider only part of relevant information that fits into the mental schema we have on the situation;
- individuals who collect biased information fail to correct for bias.
What can be done?
a) introduce clear step by step procedures of information collection;
b) encourage employees to avoid asking questions that can be answered with yes/no responses.
The cognitive shortcomings characteristic to the drawing conclusions are:
- Individuals weigh vivid and extreme evidence more heavily
What can be done?
a) require employees to consciously classify information according to its appropriate weight.
2. Individuals use their preexisting theories to interpret the evidence. Instead of using information to test their theories, they use their theories to test their information.
What can be done?
a) encourage using non-standard theories;
b) discourage individuals to see unexpected events as failures.
3. Individuals often draw cocnlcusins that are overconfident or overoptimistic.
What can be done?
a) introduce rules on the amount of buffer time added to the projects;
b) encourage employees to create a detailed plan of the planned work before they give their time estimations.
So even though we as individuals are prone to the large number of biases and shortcomings, together as an organisation we can overcome them. As the authors of the article say “Humans did not fly to the Moon. NASA did”.
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