Ep 76 Creativity: Why cognitive bias is the real problem with your work.

In this insightful episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates delves into the six key cognitive biases that often create recurring challenges in the workplace, impacting team dynamics, client relationships, and even our own decision-making. Understanding these psychological biases can help you identify the root causes behind common frustrations and equip you with strategies to overcome them. Tune in to learn how addressing cognitive bias can improve your work, strengthen your team, and drive better outcomes for your company.

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Transcript

Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody and welcome into the 76th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host Stephen Gates and this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership design, and everything else. That matters to creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show so you get the latest episodes whenever those come out. And remember, you can always listen to all the shows, get the show notes and a lot more. Just head over to the crazy one.com that's the crazy and the number one.com. Man it has been, it has been longer than I've wanted. Since I've been able to put out one of these shows I have been traveling like an absolute idiot. I don't think anytime in the last two months I've even been able to spend a whole weekend at home that's not even gonna be true this weekend because it's Saturday I'm leaving tomorrow to head to Chicago. So I've been and I've been spending a lot of time doing a lot of work traveling around doing a lot of different things had. I don't know if you ever hear the dog snoring in the background. My oldest dog he had some some health problems so I had to spend a little bit time with her getting her back into shape, but She has good raring to go snore and under the desk just like the good old times. And we're ready to roll with another episode. So as I have been doing all this traveling, the thing I've sort of realized is that the more companies and the more people I see, the more I see how we really just all kind of no matter where you are in the world, we just really share this creative condition. And as a result, we share some pretty common, pretty huge problems. And I think one of the biggest ones, is why to pretty much all creatives run into this sort of problem of not being able to get the people around them, their clients, their co workers, whatever it is, to see what they see, to try new things, and to not always run to a solution every time they do something. And I think, you know, it might be very easy whenever you look at this problem to say, look, you know, we might just want to blame these problems on individual personalities. But I just see it so much and I've seen it all over the world. I see so many different companies with so many little different maturities. That I think it's a problem that actually runs a lot A lot deeper. And I think these barriers and behaviors are so common, because they're part of our shared psychology. And I know that there's a lot of this sort of stuff that we talked about here. But I think that's the part of it for me is that I have this really interesting sort of unique vantage point to be able to work with all these different people. And I think that's the thing is like, as I've worked with more companies, and the more I've seen this sort of commonality, the more I want to understand it, the more I want to start studying it, the more I want to start sharing it with you. So in this episode, we're going to look at cognitive bias. And this is something as I've started to teach design methodologies as I tried to chant turn around teams, as I even tried to turn around companies as I try to get people to think and act differently. This is really the foundational thing that I'm teaching a lot of them right now. And it really is the psychological basis for so many of the problems that I think we run into. So in this episode, I want to look at just what is it? Why is it a part of these problems and so that we can really understand what it is to be able to recognize it and then talk a little bit about what do we do about it. I think the challenge with doing anything creative is that there's no right. There's no wrong answer. I give everybody who listens to the show a problem. I'm gonna get however many people take up that challenge, I'm gonna get that number of results because there's not a right answer. And the thing that happens is whenever you're dealing with something that that's debatable, it means that success is then really linked to the people that you work with. The way that they think the biases that they might bring into the problems, their strengths, their weaknesses, their confidences, their insecurities, all those sorts of things now suddenly come into it, because this isn't two plus two equals four, this is two plus two equals burnt sienna. Right? Like it's some sort of thing like that. And, you know, Bob Ross may be talking about all little happy accidents, but I think a lot of what we do and a lot of the clients that we deal with, there aren't any happy accidents, and that's not part of this process. And as creatives, we are more used to taking risks. We're more used to experimenting, staying open minded dealing with uncertainty. It's just kind of the natural part. of what we do. Now that by no means says that just because we're creative, that we're immune from having the same problems and biases, I'm not saying that at all. I just think that there's a little bit of our wiring, it's a little bit differently. But it does mean that if you want to be successful, as an individual creative, as a team, as anything like that, then you're gonna have to learn to identify and deal with some of these basic human psychological biases and issues. And this has really come about because in a lot of ways, what a lot of creators are being asked to do is to go from visual design to product design. The days of just really being able to show up make something pretty, aren't really there anymore. Now all of a sudden, we have to deal with data and statistics, we have to deal with other team members we need to do with product people and technology. We need to deal with what consumers are thinking and metrics and results and, and all these other things that come into play, which means we're having to open up our process to a lot more people is an opportunity but it's also a challenge the opportunity as it gives us a really, really powerful, really interesting seat to be able to affect business. Right now, but it's a challenge because I'm fairly certain that at least the last time I checked, I didn't see psychological biases being taught in art school, I didn't see it being taught at any companies or being a part of your onboarding process or even part of any conversations. So what we're left with is this sort of gap and understanding and a lot of frustration, a lot of people who really aren't sure why they can't break through. And I think that's the moment we're in. But cognitive bias is a really interesting thing whenever you start to study it, and I know what you're thinking to yourself outside of maybe something that's like, you know, a double word score in Scrabble that you can when you two, you can use it to win the game. And I just also realized how friggin data that reference was, I don't know, Words with Friends, pick whatever you want. But I think that there definitely is this thing of just like, what is it and why is it important? Let's start with why it's important. It's important because cognitive bias is the foundation for most of the problems that you're having with your team, your co workers and your clients right now. I will guarantee you, I've seen it time and time again. Because like I said, cognitive biases are they're different. Caesar limitations in people's thinking, are thinking other people's thinking. And they are really born out of it could be an error in your memory. It could be kind of like a social attribution. So it's the way that you're letting society or other people influence you. It can be the way that other people are influencing your thinking. It can be a miscalculation, but it it's something about the way our brain translates reality. And it is really then our perspective and some of these sorts of things and psychological tendencies that we all have, that really start to influence us. That whenever you start to study and I've read a bunch of different articles looked at a bunch of different books. In general, I would say if you sort of aggregate all of them there, they're probably about 12 different types of biases that most people will agree on. And we're not, don't worry, we're not going at all 12 of those today, because that's just there's a lot and I think that they're not all of them are going to affect the creative process equally. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to post the article there's there's one article in particular I think does a really good job of kind of capturing and capsulated. All that, I'm gonna post that in the show notes. But what I want to do is that there are six, so we're going to focus on just half of them. And I think these six are the ones that affect creatives the most. And the largest number of teams that I'm kind of working with. And so I think these are the six that I want to look at. And I'm gonna bet that as we talk about these, you're either going to think about things that you've done, you're gonna think about projects that you've worked on, maybe in the past, maybe right now, or you've experienced this sort of stuff, maybe you've seen it yourself, maybe you've seen it in your team, maybe you've seen it in your clients, maybe even seen it in your personal life. But the sixth, I want to talk about our confirmation bias, something called the bandwagon effect, and observational selection, bias, projection, bias, negativity bias. And finally, something called the anchoring effect. And I know that these all have kind of like very clinical names. So as we go through these, I'm gonna I'm going to try to put them sort of in context so that you're gonna be able to spot these next time you see them Let's start with confirmation bias. Now, confirmation bias is really defined as the unconscious act of referencing only those perspectives that fuel your pre existing views, while at the same time ignoring or dismissing opinions, no matter how valid, that you don't agree with. Confirmation bias is basically the state of the world right now, I think whenever you want to talk about politics, where you're talking about religion, whenever you want to talk about gender, whenever you want to talk about an ethnicity, any of these sorts of things. What this basically means is that you surround yourself with people who agree with you. This is where a lot of gender bias or where race bias comes out, because you will surround yourself with people of either the same gender of the same race, who look like you who act like you who think like you. Now, it doesn't mean with any of these biases that they're done with ill will. Some of them are subconscious. The problem tends to become whenever they become conscious and you embrace them, that's when we run into racism and other things like that. But confirmation really is the bias of a lot of those sort of things where it's just Yeah, we want to surround ourselves with people who agree with us. That's why, you know, with the divisiveness and politics and things like that so many people are either muting or cleaning up their social media feeds, they're doing all these sorts of things. Because we don't like opinions that sort of undermine us that make us feel uncomfortable. But that's from kind of the the society standpoint, from the company in the work standpoint, I think in a lot of cases, what happens with this is that it can become a company or a leadership problem. If you just simply surround yourself with people that agree with you. Now, for you as an individual creative, what you need to think about is that if whenever you're working on something, if whenever you have an idea that you're working through, you just take it to people who agree with you, you just people who are going to tell you how awesome and how amazing you are and do a lot of those things. Well, yes, it makes you feel good. It is going to make your work suck. Because no one is challenging you there is no friction there is nothing to be able to kind of push back against to say, hey, look, this could be better. It's probably a bigger problem whenever you look at company and leadership because if you surround yourself with only people who agree with you, then you run in trouble. Obviously a really big problem because, you know, if they're only gonna agree with you, then you're never going to find any innovation, you're never going to find any differentiation, you're never going to get better because everything is just gonna be hunky dory all the time. And let me look, on the one hand, this isn't about, like, you know, it's the end of the world or something like that. But the best teams are the ones that have the ability to challenge each other. The best teams are the ones who know that whenever you bring a piece of work in, they're the people that you work with the teams that you're a part of, they're gonna challenge you, they're going to ask you to do better, they're going to try to poke holes in your thinking and your logic and they're gonna push you on those things. It's not always comfortable. It's not always easy. You see, that's why a lot of creators will hold the work really tight to them. Because it makes them uncomfortable. Just simply surrounding yourself with people who agree with you much easier. So I think when it comes to confirmation bias, the challenge that I have for you is how do you deliberately seek out perspectives and thinking, the challenge your work in your thinking? How do you actually seek out the people You're not going to be honest with you, how do you seek out the people they're going to push back, that are going to say, look, I think this could be better. And that's why I said, it can be a delicate balance. Because you know, if somebody just wants to be negative be an asshole, that doesn't really do any good. But if you can find the ones, and be able to get your team to the place, everybody does that. Man, that becomes an amazingly amazingly powerful thing. And that's sort of what it is that you want to do. Now, I think that the other part of this really comes down to it may mean that you if you're a leader, it may mean that if your particular company, you may also need to rethink the way that you're hiring or the way at least you're creating your teams in a different way. Because again, I think that the best teams that I work with, understand these biases, talk about if for some of them, it's even part of their onboarding. But the thing that they then do is that they think about the pairings they think about the way that people work, and that they put people together who are going to push each other, they put people together, they're gonna push each other to do better work. So they're deliberate and they they lean into that tension. They understand that this is a good part of the work that just simply again, surrounding yourself with the smile feeling happy people that love everything you do, isn't going to lead to the work that we really need to do. So look at these sort of things, I think both in yourself, but in a lot of the sort of different ways that your teams are built in the way that maybe you lead and a few of those other things to be able to look at like, Look, are we just all being too nice? Are we just all agreeing with each other too much? And are we gonna do all this sort of thing of just like, confirm how great we all are, honestly, to mediocrity. Now, the bandwagon effect, I think whenever you hear that, you probably have a pretty good understanding of what this is, right? Because the bandwagon effect is when a big group of people start to pick a winner or a favorite that, you know, whenever it's just us, maybe we wouldn't go in that direction. But whenever everybody starts to come together, when everybody starts to kind of go in one direction, that part of like our individual brain almost starts to shut down and we get into that like really destructive groupthink mentality. I think you see this the most when teams work with executives or when they work with senior leadership. where, you know, you may be doing a brainstorm, maybe you're doing a design review, it could be any number of different meetings, any number of different acts interactions. But what you see is that in a lot of leaders, they feel like I'm a leader, I need to talk first, I need to have the opinion, people need to follow me because I'm in charge, which is a great and fantastically antiquated way of looking at that. But what happens is that that senior person often will speak first. And what you'll see is that then everyone else scurrying around trying to figure out why they agree with them. No one challenges it, nobody will kind of say anything different. Everybody just kind of goes yeah, that's great. And everyone just sort of piles on because going against them bandwagon. Well, that that suddenly feels really strange. And all of a sudden, I'm standing on my own. Maybe people judge me, maybe they laugh at me, but maybe they don't like it. What's that gonna be? It's just easier to go with the crowd. But this ideation by seniority, it doesn't work for a lot of reasons. And I think there are some pretty obvious reasons but mainly because you're taking away the thinking and the experience of the team. creativity comes in the disagreement creativity comes in the tension, creativity comes in. The discussion. And I think, you know, it also, I think in a lot of cases means that if your team does this, then their work isn't being challenged enough, it isn't being refined enough that the results are going to fall short of their potential. Because everybody's just taking the easy path. Every time. Somebody has an idea, we just say, Great, that's good enough. And we go along with it. So the bandwagon effect here. And with a lot of these, I think that the beginning of this is to vocalize it, to become aware of it to watch it whenever it happens. But then there's the challenge of it. And the challenge here is that, you know, if you're on a team, as an individual, you need to say what you really think. And you need to be able to do that consistently. You need to encourage other people to do it. You need to seek out diverse perspectives. You need to bring these different things in. So it's not just everybody kind of homogenous Lee thinking doing that groupthink, and everybody is surrounded by the same perspective. Because then you get blind spots, then the work really suffers and if you're a leader, you need to be a This and the biggest thing I can tell you to do is speak last speak and problems, don't speak in solutions. And maybe don't even speak at all. And I've done this, and we talked about this in other episodes, but understanding the role of your job and that your job is not always to be able to just simply provide the solution. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go back, there's an episode that I did that was about the 10 8010 rule. Go back and listen to that. Because it talks about how you know about 20% of the time are nuclear options, but 80% of the time, you need to speak in challenges, not in solutions. And this is one of those places. Why? Because there is this bias that sits out there. This is the reason why that becomes incredibly important. And I think even when I did that episode, I wasn't even consciously aware of a lot of these biases that I think only recently have I started to have this light turn on even for me, and it's only because I'm spending time looking at this stuff. So this is not something that you should be like, Oh, I should, I should know this naturally, you shouldn't because again, you're probably surrounded by people that are doing it. Now observational selection bias. This is whenever you notice things that maybe you do. didn't see before or maybe you just didn't see them as much before. And now that you see them, you will probably wrongly assume that the frequency of those things has somehow increased. The best example that I know to give and if you live in probably in New York or something, maybe this example doesn't work for you, but figure I'm sure there's something else that will the best example that I'm able to use with most people is it happens whenever you go to buy a car, or any sort of big purchase of something that there's more than one of right like houses, it doesn't work because you know, unless you're, I don't know what buying like clone house or something like that doesn't work. But cars are most often where it happens. And what happens is like you go through the process and you start to look at consider different cars, you start to settle on one that you feel like you want and maybe you've done this with headphones, maybe with laptops, but like any of these different sorts of things. But whenever you start to settle on thinking, Hey, I think I want to get this I think I want to buy this. Then all of a sudden you're seeing that car everywhere. Oh my god I was surrounded by parking lots are full of roads. are full of these sorts of things before and you feel better and better about your decision because Wow, look at all these other people that have this car, I must be doing the right thing. And that's the thing is, since you feel like you're seeing these things so much, you think you've got to be right, and you're doing the right thing. Well, the matter of fact, is that it's the same number of cars that have always been out there. And you know, they've always been there. But it's just now your brain is noticing them. So that whenever you do that, you're now starting to influence your perception. The same can be true when you do creative work, whatever all of a sudden, you're on to what you think is a really good idea. Maybe there's an insight that you found a consumers, maybe there's something that you think about. The reason why observational selection bias becomes dangerous, is because all of a sudden, you can start to see justification for your idea. You can find justification for your insight for your behavior, for whatever that is everywhere. And maybe it is there. Maybe it is this big aha that nobody's ever thought about maybe it is actually there. But the challenge for you here is going to be twofold. I think one is to not To just simply run to the assumption that that is the solution that I'm seeing at every place I feel justified and what that is. And so that must be right. I think what we need to do is we need to stay open to the possibilities without focusing on just one. You need to go back to edit, you need to research you need to look at it, you need to test it out to see and what I seen and the way that it maybe it resonates with me, does that resonate on a larger scale? Or maybe I'm in the minority, maybe the way I feel is actually not the way most of our consumers feel. But it's that ability to stay open to the possibilities without focusing on just one of them. That's what becomes so incredibly important in this process, because if not, you basically is you talking yourself into why this is such a great idea without validating it. And this is where so many designers so many creatives, like observational selection bias is the foundation for most jokes about designers and creatives, because we're so sure we feel like we're so insightful and what we think is so different for everybody else. Like I said, sometimes maybe it is whatever it's not that's whenever this this really can start to move. become a problem. So definitely, like I said, stay open to those possibilities. Now projection bias, it comes from probably something similar we've talked about, but it's a little bit different. projection bias comes from the fact that, you know, it's difficult for us to project outside of our own preference or way of thinking. So in a lot of cases, what I talked about is probably his most observational bias, but projection bias probably plays into this as well. Because we tend to assume that most people think just like us, they're actually being maybe no justification for that. And this can come up in a lot of different ways. So again, with a lot of teams, this may be Oh, I am my consumer, I am my client, I am I, I project, whatever it is, I want on to them. And I think you know what, I've learned this in some really interesting ways. I think, you know, I definitely have learned to I've even learned to kind of doing stuff with my wife and I've probably been told this story before on the show. But like one of the big ones that always stuck out to me whenever I realized that other people don't think the way that I do that other people couldn't do the things that I did, right just somehow now. Assume that they did was, I don't know what it was 1012 I don't know what a bunch of years ago, my wife and I built the house we live in. Sounds like such a great like, you know, creative, dynamic thing to do, man, is it just such a fucking bad idea. But what happened in that process is you sort of move into this big empty house, there's no blinds, like there's no nothing, you just get the house. So you've got to go out and decorate it. Well, we go into these different stores. And I don't want to have like a big kind of library downstairs. And so we want to get shells to the library, we'll say and what we would do is we would walk in and I'd see these really cool looking shells and I go man, those look perfect. And my wife look at them and she go, Wow, I hate those. Like what you mean you hate them? She's like, I don't I don't like the way Look, then I can look at it. They're like, What do you mean, they're gonna look amazing. And we'd kind of do this back and forth and we'd go home and over the kind of ensuing weeks and months I would sort of wear her down to the point where I think she would just finally to shut me up would say fine, just by him Shut up, go away. So excited. I go out and buy them and get them delivered and you know, spend the day installing them or whatever it is, and she would come home look and go oh my god. I love them. My soul diacetyl and I would get really frustrated sort of confused about why what what was going on here, what I was doing is I was projecting my brain onto her I was I was thinking that I could walk into the store, I can see these shelves on the wall in this store, and I can project them in my head to what they're gonna look like in our house, and I know they're gonna look good. My fault was that that projection was false. It was wrong. My wife can't do that. She can't see it. We're actually even now, whenever we're doing decorating or making buying decisions or talking about design stuff, we actually have it's almost like a safe word, where I can just look at her and go Remember, you can't see and show. Yeah, you know, you're right. I trust you. Because we both sort of recognize this projection bias that you know, for me that there are just our brains work differently. But that's what I said is I think you know it with a lot of design teams. I can see that using a few different ways. One is I see it used a ton. The way personas are used and abused, where people will project themselves, their project their personalities, like it's crazy. I go and work with these teams and you go from team to team and you ask them about a particular persona bob bob is their main persona like Tell me about Bob. They will Describe in 16 different ways, all of them somehow seem to be customized to the tchotchkes and the stuff that is on that person's desk and the magazines that they're reading in the car that they drive. But it's that projection. So then you start to realize that they're projecting their feelings and their thoughts onto this persona and mutating it from its original purpose, because all of a sudden, we're putting all these other variables in there that might not be in there. So I think the challenge here with any projection bias, and it's a little bit around the observational selection bias as well. Don't be so arrogant to think that your consumer or that you are, who you're designing for creating for whatever it is go out and talk to real people get real reactions that are projected on how you think they're going to act and react, actually go out and talk to them. Sometimes it can be a really uncomfortable, mildly terrifying sort of thing to see maybe how disconnected you are from whenever you're like, Oh, I know my consumer, I know who they really are. And whenever you meet them, you're like, wow, was I wrong? But I think it's really important connection to stay grounded in that reality and stay grounded in that truth because as you look at observational selection and projection biases, these both can really leave work astray. And I think you'd will tend to see this a lot of times, also In clients, I think these two are probably the biggest ones. That drive client for the drive our frustration with clients, or customers or people that we work with or things like that, is you're like, Look, this is the way you should think. And this is the way you should act. And then when they don't, then we're like, why is that and then all of a sudden, there's this big disconnect, and you're really frustrated. And I think that sort of feeds into the next bias around negativity bias. And, you know, negativity bias is that people tend to pay more attention to bad news. And that honestly, if you really study it, whenever they're given the choice, we will perceive negative news as being more important and more credible than good news. Right? This is why every news source no matter what your political affiliation runs to negativity, because we're like, Wow, this is so much more serious. Wow, this is, this is the psychological underpinning behind why they do that and it's also the underpinning behind why it works. The problem with this is that when you're doing something creative, you're going to get things wrong. You are going to make mistakes, you are working in a medium where there is not the ability to ask Have something quote unquote, right? And a lot of times, the thing that I see is that negativity bias, like I mean, sometimes creatives can get moody and get a little bit emo, we all can admit that. But I think that, you know, for the teams, the problem is that you need to make sure that everyone understands that if there was not a real high level of design maturity on the team, that it's only a mistake if we don't learn from it. And if we don't iterate after it, that there this is the way that we do this. Because you don't want that negativity to creep in. You don't want people to get motivated, you don't want whenever you need to iterate, go back to the drawing board, fix something, you don't want that to feel negative to them. And you don't want the news about that to get blown out of proportion. Because you know that if it's bad news, people are going to run in and treated more seriously. But I think the other part of this probably more around negativity bias is for the clients, the people that surround your team. You need to educate them, what the process is like, you need to educate them that this is a normal part of the process, that whenever you're doing this, that it's not about failing. So again, negativity bias is why I have this war on the word failure. I really, really I hate it. I'm really trying to get like that fail fast is bullshit, right? Because like failure means it has negativity in the finite sense. Like failure is badly positioned learning. Learning is what we actually want to do learning. You say, Hey, we want to go learn. I was like, Yeah, let's go learn. You say, Hey, we're gonna go fail. everybody's like, Whoa, what do you mean, we're gonna go fail? Like, wait, wait, wait, we're paying you too much. But like, No, no, nobody can fail. Fail has a bad connotation. And I think that that way, in a lot of cases, that's why even doing subtle things like using from words around failure to learning, positioning it around, things like that we are doing research we are learning we're like, those are the things that we're doing that sort of will fail fast, like, screw that, like, get rid of that. But I think because what you want to do is that you want to educate people as an arm part of the process, they don't worry about it. You know? If not, then what they're gonna do is they're gonna fix it on that negativity, they're gonna lose confidence, you're gonna start to short circuit the process, they're going to start to run in with solutions, like a lot of that sort of stuff. Is it a lot of times why clients come in and really kind of do this poop and poop because all of a sudden, they are like, Oh, my, something's going right. This is where it should be. feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure what that is. And here again, it's getting people to see the possibilities and the challenges. But to hear again, also understand that for us, as creatives, we are much more used to jumping off that cliff building our wings on the way down. Other people aren't used to that. They don't work that way. That uncertainty, it just feels like panic inducing for them, they can't they don't understand how to deal with it. So again, it's not that they're doing anything wrong. This is just the way people are. But if we can talk about it, if whenever it happens, we can say, hey, look, remember, we said this might happen, then you can at least start to have a conversation around a position and control it do things like that. But like I said, it is the awareness of it and to make sure people see the possibilities and the challenges, but looking at those in equal measure. Now finally comes the anchoring effect. And the anchoring effect comes from the fact that we tend to compare and contrast if we're really being honest, only a limited set of items because what we will usually do is to fixate on something that we really like something that we felt good about. Maybe Assuming that we created, and what we'll do is instead of kind of staying open to the possibilities, instead of saying open to a larger set of things that we can compare, what we tend to do is we tend to fixate on the one we like the most. And then we'll sort of just compare everything against that. So we anchor onto that one idea, we anchor on to that one design, we anchor on to that one way something is written or created, or whatever it is. And I think, you know, a lot of times, what I'll see is that that sort of anchoring effect will really often happen with individuals and with teams in their creative process. And it usually happens whenever they anchor to the first idea that they had. Because there's actually a chemical reaction in your brain. Again, I've talked about this in the past where whenever you're posed with a problem, it sort of creates this tension in your brain and whenever you solve it, it you get a dopamine hit very similar to what happens whenever you unlock your phone. Whenever you get a like on social media. There's this little hit of dopamine that comes in makes you feel good. And whenever you feel good, you're like, wow, that was great. And it disproportionately makes you like one particular idea or disproportionately like one sort of thing and so We find this sense of relief, but then we also anchor to that idea. And I think that's why for me in a lot of cases, design methodologies, design sprints, design thinking things that are going to force you to look at multiple lines of thinking, multiple insights, multiple how my work has become so important, because it fights that anchoring effect. But the way that you'll usually watch this express itself is that if you watch a team, they'll go through they'll go they'll do their How might we they do their brainstorm, they find that first idea that they really like, well, then you'll sort of instead of getting like idea one and idea two, you get like idea one and idea one a and one B where it's just sort of slight variations off of that initial theme. They're not backing up, they're not kind of finding a different lane to that they're anchoring to the first one. So I think the challenge here is how do you force yourself into these sort of distinct lines of thinking, with multiple ideas, you don't anchor on just one, don't fall in love with your first idea. In every case, you need to look at things openly, objectively, you may be able to test them try to break them. But that's the point is that in many cases, there are these sort of subtle things that are in big Do all of us, that can really affect our work and can really affect our careers and can really affect a lot of the things that we do. And it's going to do it in ways that we aren't even aware of. And I think that like I said, it was only once I started to study this only as I started to look at these only as you were able to kind of listen to the show, think about these examples, go back to work, watch yourself, watch your team, then I think you're probably gonna go, Oh, my God, these are everywhere we are surrounded by this stuff. And then that sort of comes into the challenge. Because, you know, I've been doing the show long enough. I've said this before. But like, if you want to create change, then you need to deal with the way your company, your team, maybe even you think not just the way they behave, because behaviors are the expression of the problem. Whenever we talk about anchoring to one idea and how it manifests itself, that's a behavior. And part of what it is is to use the behavior as the signal use the behavior as a way to be able to spot it, but understand that the behavior is just the expression, that it's actually the thinking it's the thing that underlies that, that that's the place where you need to start teaching these things to your team. You need to help them start to understand how you work. Understand, how do you call that out, understand why these things are a problem. And whenever you do this, this is not about doing this is not wrong. It isn't, oh, my God, were somehow defective. Oh my god, we're having this problem. Oh, my God, we're doing this thing wrong. That's not what this is. That's why I said this is a base part of every single person out there. And that is our ability because I think the best teams that I work with the best work that I've ever done, were the moments whenever we were able to be deliberate. It was the moments when we're able to understand what our issues were somewhat, we're able to call those out and work on them together. Whenever we worked on them in isolation, whenever we would ignore them, then that's when they became really big problems. But I think when you do that thing, when you start to call it out, then you can start to have a discussion about how do we want to behave? How do we agree on that? What are the things that we need to aspire to? What are the things We need to change. And if you're a leader that becomes very, very important not just for you to be able to communicate to your team. But I think the place where these conversations do the most goes because it allows the team to then have a conversation inside of themselves. Maybe it's about the way people behave, maybe it's about the way these biases are. Maybe it's about the things that frustrate these different people. Because without that, being deliberate without that conversation, the way that this expresses itself is in people even getting frustrated not seeing anything. Maybe they quit, maybe they get angry, maybe they do these different things, but or it builds up maybe it's just in their personality, they decide to fight it to call it out. And then most of the time, they maybe don't necessarily have the emotional intelligence or the social skills to do it well, so they just kind of come off like an asshole. But I think your ability to talk about these things, to agree on them to be able to say, look, this is the way we want to behave. These are the things that we need to do differently. It creates a really safe space for the team to be able to hold each other accountable to that. The default some event somebody is anchoring to one idea you can say hey guys, remember we said we have this problem where anchor on to our first idea There we go, you need to know it. You know what, you're right. We did agree to that. Let's do something different. Whenever you say, Hey guys, remember, we're kind of leaning on this persona too much. We haven't done testing in a long enough time, then you'll say, you know what, you know, you're right. Let's go do that. Because now there is a social contract, that there's a centralized set of behaviors that everyone can reference. And I think that's what becomes really important is because those behaviors allow everyone to hold everyone else accountable to fighting those problems, but doing it as a group. Because these are group problems. There is groupthink that goes on in your team, in your company, whatever it is, it just happens whenever people spend a lot of time together, right? Like a lot of stuff starts to happen. Whenever you start to be hanging around a certain number of people. That's why in so many cases, you know, whatever, like fresh blood comes in, when a new person comes in, it's like, oh, wow, this is so great. It's so different. Because they haven't, their brain hasn't started to match everybody else's. So they're doing something different. So encourage that individuality, encourage that crazy encourage those sort of things. Be aware of what these things are. Like I said, these are just a part of human nature. I can guarantee you I've worked with teams of every maturity all in every corner of this world. And they all share this same problem. Like I'll go into really mature teams. And that's why I said the best ones are the ones that recognize the best ones. And some of the best ones I work with. It's actually a part of their onboarding. So that's what I want you to think about. How can you do this stuff differently? How can your team or your company like start in a scale you can actually affect but to be aware that these biases are there? They're very real. They're very much the forces that are probably controlling, influencing undermining frustrating you maybe every single day, and that these are the things that once you're able to look at them, become aware of them, start to control them. Not only does everybody start getting along better, not only do does the team start to function better, but again, the work is the truth. I keep saying this for a reason, because the work gets better because the work is a byproduct of all those things. And whenever the bias is when then again, the work is the truth. And it's a projection of all those biases. So as always, if you find The show the least bit helpful please do me a favor, head over leave a review on whatever your favorite podcast platform is makes a big difference brings more people to the show makes me feel like I'm not just in this room talking to myself at this point. I'm fairly certain that I'm not but it always certainly helps. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode whenever those come out. Whenever I'm doing shows like this, I'm talking about articles and posting show notes, things like that. You can find out about this show other ones related articles, all that stuff, head over to the crazy one calm. It's not crazy. And the number one calm. Follow me on any side of social media, you got a Facebook page for the show, reach out ask questions. If you agree with that. If you don't agree with things, you're like, hey, how does this really affect me? This is what I'm saying reach out. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And if I don't hear back in a couple days, ping me and say look, you're supposed to write me back. I'm sure I'll do it. Like I said, just sometimes I get trapped on planes. Little like asleep jetlag The struggle is real. But as always everybody down illegal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. This is just me out here talking. So finally I say it every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know the time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have, was incredibly humbled to spend any of it with me. So go out, fight the fight the good bias, fight, do all those things. Thanks and until next time, stay crazy.