Work Skills for the Future: Constructive Uncertainty

Learning to slow down decision-making, especially when it affects other people, can help reduce the impact of bias.

The idea of constructive uncertainty is not predicated on eliminating our biases: they are as built into our minds as deeply as language and lust. | Stowe Boyd

In recent years, science has shed a great deal of light on human cognitive bias, but, lamentably, the impacts of those breakthroughs in understanding cognition have yet to be felt in business, for the most part.

The first step for anyone who wants to counter our in-built biases is to be aware of them and take actions that will counter them, to the extent that is possible. That final proviso is based on science, again. In many cases, simply being aware of a certain sort of bias is not sufficient to counter its hold on our reasoning.

Two well-known examples are sharedness bias and preference bias in group decision making (for a longer discussion, see Dissensus, not consensus, is the shorter but steeper path).

• Sharedness bias is the tendency of a group to judge shared information — information which all or…