Beware What You Pay Attention To
Strategic cognitive biases, part 15
You, most likely, know about the confirmation bias.
If you believe that keeping prices for your products low is the best strategy, you’ll see the confirmations of the idea everywhere.
Your brain simply ignores or doesn’t notice things that contradict its beliefs.
However, confirmation bias has another side: your brain sees what it is afraid of, even if it doesn’t exist.
The FOMO is one of the examples.
If you’re afraid your competitors will outpace you using a brand-new technology, such as AI, you will see signs of it everywhere.
A CEO who changes their strategy drastically simply because they read in a business magazine that their competitors employ AI falls victim to this bias.
Ages ago, only our most cautious ancestors survived and passed their genes to the next generations.
Evolution taught us to pay much attention to what scares us, sometimes too much.
Having an imperfect strategy is better than changing a perfect one twice a quarter.
Don’t do something just because your competitors are doing it. Make your own decisions.
Don’t react to every piece of news — you will forget most of it within days.
In the picture, you can see the result of my request to ChatGPT, which was creatively rethought by the algorithm.
I asked for a saber-toothed tiger and a bear, and it decided to mix their traits in one creature on the right of the picture.
Check out my new book, Red and Yellow Strategies: Flip Your Strategic Thinking and Overcome Short-termism, here.
Read also: Sense the world through your customers’ eyes. How to find out what your customers really want
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