WHY YOUR INTUITION IS NOT ALWAYS A GOOD THING — AND HOW TO DEAL WITH INBUILT BIAS
We’re always told to trust our gut, to follow our instincts — and broadly speaking, that’s good advice. But there’s always a but…
HORROR HEURISTICS
In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules people use to form judgments and make decisions. These mental shortcuts usually involve focussing on one aspect of a complex problem, and ignoring others. This can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice. The resulting errors are called cognitive biases, and have a huge part to play in our intuitive judgments.
These biases and assumptions can often stand in the way of creativity and be an impediment to having great ideas. We can all slip into this frame of mind, especially when we are strained, tired or hungry.
These biases could play a part in dismissing the kernel of a great idea — or persevering with an idea long after it makes sense to do so. It’s important you and your team are aware of the biases that exist in your minds — they can (and do) have a substantive effect on the outcome of a project or idea generation session.
Daniel Kahneman again:
“Heuristics can sometimes get a bad rap, at times derided as unthinking, knee-jerk reactions, simple suppositions blown into an unhelpful or even damaging strategy. They are the result of cognitive biases.”
He writes that you have intuitive feelings & opinions about almost everything that comes your way — which is a good thing for idea generation. These intuitions need to be harnessed and collated in the idea generation stage and LATER analysed to test validity. Most impressions and thoughts arise in conscious experience without you knowing how they got there, but get them out BEFORE deciding suitability. And don’t get too attached to ideas too early.
As Kahneman explains:
“When people believe a conclusion is true, they are very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when those arguments are unsound.”
We tend to make important decisions based on the coherence of the information presented rather than the completeness of the information.
Indeed, people are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it.
ALWAYS ASK GOOD, SEARCHING QUESTIONS IN YOUR IDEA EVALUATION PHASE.
Quoting Paul Slovic’s take on the affect heuristic, he adds:
“Our likes and dislikes determine our beliefs about the world.”
This is a contributory factor to ‘experts’ not always getting it right. They, like anyone else, will filter out what doesn’t support their central thesis.
Kahneman warns us to be guarded against overconfidence (in yourself and others), arguing that many of these so called experts operate under the illusion of skill, placing too much faith in their intuition.
Indeed, Kahneman argues CEOs influence the performance of their companies to a much lesser extent than the business press would suggest:
“stories of success and failure consistently exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices on firms’ outcomes.”
Further, “even if you had perfect foreknowledge that a CEO has brilliant vision and extraordinary competence, you still would be unable to predict how the company will perform with much better accuracy than the flip of a coin.”
Humans, it turns out, are not such rational animals after all. We are all victims of intuitive biases.
THE IMPORTANCE OF IDEA ABUNDANCE
To compensate for these biases — and avoid the pitfalls they throw in your path — draw on as many minds as possible in your idea generation phase.
Ideaflip is an ingenious tool for the remote-working era, providing the perfect, online space for all your team to connect, interact and create — wherever in the world they are.
The Ideaflip Brainstorm PROCESS is also perfect for at-work collaboration. It democratises the workplace, creating a platform for everyone to have their ideas heard — inspiring PEOPLE to participate through PLAY — and helps discover and harness everyone’s latent creativity.
