The Mother of All Biases: The Action Bias and the Power of Restraint
Biases can be dangerous. They can lead to misjudgments, mistakes, losses, suffering, and irreparable damages. But there is one bias that I’ve identified as the mother of all biases — at least when it comes to personal productivity.
The mother of all biases is the action bias which is a double-edged sword. It is:
- The tendency to think that value can only be realized through action
- The tendency to act as opposed to practice restraint — when both are reasonable options.
These two are related. The first formulation informs the second. We try to take action rather than restrain ourselves because we have developed a bias toward valuing action as the primary producer of value.
How the Action Bias Hurts Us
A Bias works in two ways:
- by affecting both our perceptions of things and
- by affecting how we interpret what we’ve perceived
But the focus of a lot of our work to overcome biases tends to be the latter — that is, in making sure that our analysis of things is not colored by bias. But the very things we think we see are also infected with biases, assumptions, expectations, and other things that make for huge differences between what any two people perceive.
Nowhere is this more evident than our action-based bias. We tend to think that the people who are doing the most stuff are creating the most value. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many cases, it’s the person who doesn’t act quickly or often — who restrains him or herself — that ends up affecting real change.
For that reason, it doesn’t always pay to make a quick decision, or to be the first to act. Often times, choosing to wait, think things through, and take targeted action will yield greater value.
But here’s the problem: sometimes, value develops on its own, and we reap it by taking very little action. Sometimes, taking action can actually get in the way of reaping the full value of something. I’m not inventing this way of thinking. The Chinese have a name for it: wu wei — sometimes called “non-doing”. The idea is that you can harness the power and momentum of the natural cycles and flow of things to gain the value you’re looking for. To the vast majority of people — who are steeped in action bias — this looks like nothing is being done to create value. But that is far from the truth.
Thinking, observing, exploring, or simply waiting are all work. Just because no movement or stress is observed doesn’t mean that nothing important is taking place. That’s the first kind of bias at work — we think we see something (here, a lack of work) but we’ve been colored by the action bias. It has infected the way we perceive valuable work.
We have been trained by the action bias to perceive slowness, waiting, and restraint as not contributing to value, but we are so terribly wrong about that. That’s how the action bias hurts us.
But it’s no wonder that we keep falling prey to the action bias. Overcoming it takes patience, and it requires us to simply sit with the current situation and hold tight. We’re terrible at that.
The Game is Fixed in Favor of the Bias
As if that weren’t enough, our entire way of measuring change reinforces the action bias, because it has been informed by the action bias. So it becomes an ironic tragedy to try to fix it.
Just like it takes patience to take the slower, calculated action, it also takes a more patient and calculated analysis to see all the value that such actions do bring. Why? Because the effects tend to be long-term, widespread, and defy conventional measurements and metrics.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:
Everyone agrees that emotional intelligence is important, and that it impacts organizations in important ways. But nobody really knows how to measure said impacts. We may have inklings, but anything more quantitative kind of belies the spirit of the very thing you’re trying to measure.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
The point is, we are infected with the disease of the action bias. It informs both our perceptions and how we think about what we perceive. It also affects what we think is valuable, and how we measure that value. All this leads to a cycle of action reinforcing itself. I’m not sure it will end any time soon.
So perhaps the best thing that you can do to truly disrupt things is to break out of the chains of the action bias. I’d be interested to hear from those of you who have.
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