You're wrong But So Am I, on Navigating Bias

I was walking down the stairs at the train station heading to my connecting train and noticed a woman with a visual impairment using her guide cane to go down the stairs. She was using her guide cane to hit the step in front of her "plink" and carefully step down. I watched her in awe and she repeated the process until she stopped unexpectedly at the top of the second set of stairs. I stopped at the bottom step to see if she would continue but she just stood there looking confused for a full minute. So, I turned against the bustling herd of people rushing down the steps and went back to ask her if I could help. She said "I was listening for my connection and they didn't say which track the Zurich train is on".

I replied, "no problem, we can just look over there on the screen".

She laughed.

It took me a full second to realize what I had just said and then I was hit with the realization (and the emotions that came with it) that between the two of us, in that moment, I was the one who was “blind”.

This image is a visualisation of pattern recognition. It was created by Vincent Schwenk as part of the Visualising AI project launched by Google DeepMind.

This month, before we head into a new year, I want to use this innocent experience in the train station to talk about how what we think we know limits what we don’t know. In psychological terms, this is referred to as bias, and there’s a dozen different pre-fixes for it, hindsight bias, over confidence bias, confirmation bias… the list goes on! In spiritual terms, it’s often referred to as being “asleep” or being unconscious. Either way, whatever you want to label it, the illusion that we think we know everything is one of our greatest limitations when it comes to reaching our full potential in problem solving and, frankly, in our personal growth as individuals.

Basically, if you want to grow beyond your potential, you have to first let go of the anchors of your previous experience. With that in mind, this newsletter is divided into two short sections:

1. The comfort of thinking we are right

2. The opportunity in knowing nothing

Let’s go!

[Or just scroll down to the end for the Quick n’ Dirty!]

Thinking we are right feels right

Humans are sense-making machines - we look for patterns (and meaning) in everything! This is an essential part of our evolutionary programming that helped us select from what was poisonous to eat, observe and predict how animals behave to hunt them, and disseminate important information about how tools are made. The list goes on throughout our history.

In short:

1. We learn through experience →

2. experiences turn into mental representations or patterns →

3. patterns are reinforced as important or rewarded →

4. patterns turn into rules (shortcuts for understanding patterns) →

5. we are left with low-cognitive energy expending decision making tool we call “knowledge”.

   
   

This reinforced learning system has two symbiotic by-products:

1. We have a desire to continue the reinforcement process: think about when you first learned how to play a game and then how it felt turning into an expert - although slow and difficult at first, there’s a massive rewarding momentum that comes with that, primarily due to the mesolimbic dopamine system which gets activated, releasing dopamine to reinforce successful behaviours and encourage repetition.

2. We find patterns and create judgements even when they don’t exist: think about when you read into a situation, like when you start making up reasons for why your friend didn’t text you back, or like I did with the woman who I thought was confused, but really she was just listening to the announcement which I have learned to ignore.

So you see, there is always a trade-off to our intelligence because it works via these mental representations and within them, the simpler the rules, the more abstract they must be, and the fewer details they can include. This simplicity makes them easier to remember but can also limit how efficient they are. This means we don’t always make fully rational decisions. For example, oftentimes we falsely reinforce that learning process and keep making “mistakes” even after the rational or correct answer has been clearly explained to us.

In teams and organizations, this can mean that groups continue to make the same wrong decisions again and again. Because the people in the organization have limited time, attention, and thinking capacity, they often rely on familiar routines. These routines can stay in place even when they lead to very poor outcomes.

So, what …if I’m wrong?

We have established that human beings create simplified and incomplete representations of the problems facing them. If this is the case, the only way to cook up truly innovative solutions to these problems is to abandon those representations.

In a practical sense, this is about intentionally assuming you’re wrong and building it in to your practice. Although it feels good to feel like you’re solving the problem in a given moment, practice pausing and ask yourself or your team “what if we are wrong? what could it mean?”

Now be careful, because you and your team will be tempted to PROVE that you are right and you need to fight this urge and try to look for reasons why the opposite might be true! In other words, instead of trying to prove why you’re right, look for reasons why you might be wrong.

There’s a thought experiment I love to use for the rational side of my brain and the bias problem. In a moment where you think you are absolutely right or what you think is true, ask yourself: “As I am experiencing this moment right now, how many other experiences am I not having?”

Spoiler: the answer is infinite! And if that’s true, and our lives and knowledge are made up of a bunch of these finite moments, how can we be so hung up on those minuscule grains of knowledge we call the truth? How can I be so sure that this is right or true right now when we have missed out on an infinite number of alternative experiences and solutions.

So, heading into a new year, I challenge you to ask yourselves:

How would someone who doesn’t have our experiences answer this question or solve this problem?

In an alternate universe, how would they approach this problem?

If I was blind, how would I see this problem?

In a world where we have one single experience out of an infinite number of possible experiences, or read a book and suddenly feel like an expert, be the change - read a book and consider how much there is that this book prevents you from knowing.

But hey, don’t take my word for it:

James Dyson of Dyson talks about hiring inexperienced workers.

Try this little puzzle to test your problem solving.

If you are going to read a book to consider what you don’t know, start here where I borrowed a chapter for the title ;)

For some more reflections about our knowledge networks vs AI watch The Thinking Game.

This quick and dirty?

Our brains love patterns, shortcuts, and feeling right, which is great for surviving, but terrible for seeing what we’re missing. We cling to old experiences like safety blankets, build simple mental models and rules that feel true, and then defend them even when they’re wrong.

The real magic happens when we assume we don’t know. By asking “what if I’m wrong?” or imagining how someone with totally different experiences would see things, we break out of our tiny slice of reality and open the door to better ideas and deeper growth. You’re wrong about everything but so am I, and that is our greatest opportunity.

Think I’m wrong? Me too!