On Cognitive Bias

Is our thinking biased?

What effect do cognitive biases have on our capacity for free and independent action?

Cognitive biases are ‘out there.’

Cognitive biases are also ‘in here.’

Where ‘in here’?

Orientation, and we will get to that.

This picture is a codex of 188 cognitive biases (Orignially from Design Hacks; citation and link below).

It is an excellent graphical resource.

It is worth printing out and hanging up on a wall.

It is certainly worth sending to teammates in order to discuss and better understand them.

In a group discussion we might ask each teammate:

“How many are you familiar with?”

“How many are you not familiar with?”

“Do you know which ones have an effect on how you understand your environment?”

“Do you know which ones have an effect on your decisions, actions, and learning?”

And here is a question I will try to answer:

“Why do we need to be aware of cognitive biases?”

We need to be aware of cognitive biases because as thinking humans, we are all subject to them.

All 188 of them?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But we all have at least some of them, and they affect us whether we know it or not.

Back to an earlier point, we might next ask:

“What could cognitive biases possibly have to do with effective understanding of OODA?”

It’s an important question and this is my answer:

Cognitive biases reside in one’s Orientation.

Orientation shapes our Observations, Decisions, Actions and Learning.

If we don’t understand that, we are unable to account for the effect that cognitive biases can have on our sense-making, our decisions, our actions and our learning capacity.

If we do not account for cognitive biases, we will not be able to effectively shape our observations.

Our Orientation will become divergent from reality.

Our decisions, actions and learning will be misaligned.

Ultimately we will have degraded our capacity for free and independent action.

This will inevitably lead to defeat, irrelevance, or obsolescence.

Awareness and understanding of cognitive biases and how they impact our Orientation, both as individuals and as teams, is critical to our success.

Accounting for them is required as we continue to challenge assumptions, reorient, and drive to improve our capacity for free and independent action.

The awareness and accounting for cognitive biases done QUICKLY is how we can shatter outdated models, look at things from multiple perspectives, and maintain advantages.

This is yet another we as individuals and teams can thrive in chaos!

Source article I used and got the graphic; you can download a hi-res version on this page.

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