Decision making: Debiasing tactics every executive needs to learn

How do the different types of unconscious biases manifest themselves and affect our decision making? Evolutionary-based unconscious biases affect all humans fairly equally since it originates deep in our ancient past.

Examples include humans having a strong preference for wide lipped leaders, tall leaders, empathy for people similar to ourselves, we favour confidence, distrusting wide cheeked colleagues and so forth.

Cultural originating unconscious bias comes forth in the forms of undervaluing introverted colleagues, managers rewarding visibility over results, committees resisting dissenting voices, boards favouring charismatic CEOs, human resources teams favouring linear career paths for prospective job candidates, etc.

A new research study by Barbara Fasolo, Claire Heard, and Irene Scopelliti utilised a unique take on the unconscious bias dilemma.

While many researchers and commentators focus on the harmful effects of unconscious bias and how it corrupts our human decision-making processes, these researchers instead decided to look into effective mitigation strategies to diminish the scourge of bias.

Still, there have been hundreds of studies over the years on how to reduce one’s bias. But the new study mixed over a hundred of these previous research investigations and looked for emerging themes to put what works and what does not work all in one place.

The team came up with two fundamentally different approaches to deal with the danger and ignorance of unconscious bias. If business leaders across East Africa could learn these debiasing techniques, then our organisations could do remarkably better with regards to awareness, training programmes, staff warnings, performance improvement plans, hiring decisions, and most importantly to many businesses in achieving much higher productivity, sales, and profits.

The more executives know about making effective choices, then the better we become at reshaping our whole decision-making environment with much less effort. The new research interestingly reveals that organisations often over-rely on debiasing awareness alone.

Read: How to survive the 11 groups of managers in Kenyan workplaces

But simple awareness of the existence of bias is not enough to banish it from our thoughts and meeting rooms. While trainings raise awareness, to truly overcome unconscious bias in our businesses actually takes sustained intentional mental cognitive effort, time, and motivation.

However, most business managers already struggle with over-stretched schedules and constant performance demands. So, first practice the researched techniques in the most complex, high uncertainty, and strategic decisions where your firm really needs the best judgment quality that matters the most deeply and whereby people must retain their own autonomy all while holding on to their trust in the organisation’s leadership.

Without such supportive environments in our firms across our region, awareness of unconscious bias fades away into the background while our old decision habits influenced by our cultural and evolutionary past return quickly.

When having to make routine common decisions, managers can rely on structured comparisons between options, write down a costs/benefits of the decision or a risks/payouts probabilities list.

Then they can visualise information into graphs, charts, and tables to reduce the mental cognitive load in order to deliver more consistent decision improvements over time.

Otherwise, we are susceptible to the tone of voice our staff use, among many other irrelevant factors, when asking for decisions actually creeping in to affect our yes or no thought process.

The research found that the most effective way to reduce the effects of unconscious bias unsurprisingly involved both training on unconscious bias as well as increasing awareness of it accompanied by periodic reminders.

Then also combining it with the above decision architecture of giving a structured approach with lists and visuals. Interestingly, better decision making then starts to become the norm in our managerial minds instead of an occasional success.

Organisations that respect the realities of what it means to be human all with our cognitive limits while also designing supportive decision environments can dig deep to unlock durable improvement in decisions across the entity.

Quality judgment in firms can flourish when thoughtful intentioned people operate inside it in carefully designed systems rather than being asked to overcome bias through effort and memory of biases alone.

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