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The 5 Thinking Traps

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

All your decisions are biased! This is a simple fact that we all need to get more used to. If we don’t we are in danger of allowing a lot of automatic, and often unhelpful, patterns of thinking influence the major decisions we make. This could be anything from recruiting for a key role in our business or choosing a key supplier, to making a critical strategic decision or voting in an election. However, these thinking traps also blur the hundreds of tiny decisions we make every day.

If you have a brain, you are biased. This curious aspect of our thinking (I like to call them Thinking Traps) is a fundamental part of who we are but it was developed over millennia as a survival strategy while we were still hunter-gatherers. The world we live in has changed a bit since then but our brains are still using the same patterns of thought. 

The danger is very real

As anyone who has ever attempted a diet will know it can take a lot of effort to change our patterns of thinking or behaviour. The danger of allowing your biases to trap your thinking and your decision-making is very real. I frequently meet Directors and Managers who have made poor recruitment decisions because they let their biases influence them. There are also many stories of Boards of Directors allowing their common biases to make decisions that lead their business to ruin.  Just remember the thinking that led to the Global Financial Crises, not to mention the recent election results that may well harm the very people who voted for their preferred candidate or referendum result.

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