Embrace your bias – just don’t let it control you

In some organizations, the word “bias” has the same status as many other four-letter words; you need to avoid it in polite company. After all, leaders are supposed to be objective and data driven in their decisions and actions.

But bias is essential to decision making. In his book, “How We Decide”, Jonah Lehrer, tells the story of a man who struggled with simple decisions such as the color pen he should use or the radio station to which he should listen. The man’s problem stemmed from surgery where a part of his brain had to be removed. Interestingly, this was the same part of his brain that controlled his emotions. In other words, this man’s decision making ability became quite limited without bias/emotion. Lehrer concludes that we need both rational and an emotional (biased) thinking to make decisions. Trying to make decisions simply on facts comes nearly impossible. You can always gather more data or run more analyses. At some point, you need to make a choice – that’s where your bias comes in.

Instead of trying to remove bias, I believe that leaders should embrace it. This doesn’t mean that they should blindly act upon it. Instead, leaders should learn to use their bias to drive questions rather than answers. This is important for two reasons

1) A leader’s value comes from his or her bias. A leader’s bias is based on his or her experience. Experience and judgment is what sets leaders apart. If that shouldn’t be a part of decision-making, then every new employee would be equally qualified to lead.

2) Even if we wanted to, we can’t control our bias. Recent research on the brain shows that our brains operate too fast; often filtering information before we’ve even become conscious of it. The best we can do is learn to mitigate our bias.

So, what does a good “biased” leader do? He asks a lot of questions. He uses his bias as a basis for exploring his business and organization. He creates hypotheses and data experiments to confirm or refute his biases. That last part is important. A good leader doesn’t just look for data to confirm. A good leader is willing to recognize when the data does not support his view.

Good leaders also put their bias on the table. That’s different from what we are taught. We’ve been taught to not show our bias. But, since bias is unavoidable, most leaders wind up just masking it rather than removing it. As a result, analysis, decision-making, dialogue become inefficient and dysfunctional as people are working against forces that they can’t see or process. Instead, leaders can be upfront about their bias and invite their teams to provide opposing data. Some leaders take this even further and require that someone on the team provide an opposing view and data before they make a decision. That’s strong leadership.

Finally, good leaders surrounded themselves by people with opposing biases. This creates an appropriate level of checks and balances.

Your bias is probably what has gotten you to where you are today. If you continue to use it wisely, it will take you much further. Don’t shy away from your bias. Instead, use your bias to help make sense of data.

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6 Comments

  1. Hi Chief,

    Thanks for this post. A few questions lumped together here. 1) Can you discuss the meaning of bias? Is it a general set of orientations we carry around with us? If that’s the case, isn’t bias the same thing as personality? Or are you talking about bias with respect to a specific decision or project? 2) How should leaders go about the job of encouraging our people to admit to something they might find threatening, especially in a competitive environment? 3) Aren’t certain biases more productive than others?

    Okay, that’s it for now. Don’t worry about responding. best–anon

  2. Thanks for your comments.

    I’m using “bias” very broadly although not quite as broad as personality. I am using it to refer to the experiences, ideas, and filters through which a person views the world and the “objective” reality within it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that while I think that an “objective” reality exists. I don’t believe that any of us see it because of our biases. That’s one of the points of my post. We should recognize that we can’t see it and work from that point instead of creating the illusion that we all somehow see the same thing.

    Given that, I’d jump to your third question next. I wouldn’t say that some biases are more productive across the board. Rather, I’d say that some biases might be more productive in a point in time. For example, I have some biases about labor unions. Those bias are obviously less productive when I am in enviornments that don’t have them. However, in an environment that has a union, it’s probably important for me to recognize that might bias might be influencing how I am making sense of information, even if its not in a conversation directly associated with the unions. So, part of being a good leader is probably recognizing which biases might be relevant in a given situation.

    Now perhaps your comment was more around social biases (biases about gender, culture, demographics) being less “productive” than say a bias toward/against outsourcing something like that.

    On a societal level social biases are not productive.

    However, I guess I wasn’t arguing that biases in and of themselves are useful. Rather, I’m saying that what you do with those biases can be productive.

    If you understand your bias and bring it to the surface, there is a better chance that you might atually find out where it is flawed and/or might make better decisions.

    I guess that gets to your second question around how a leader can encourage people to admit their bias. Certainly a bias toward/against certain companies or ideas is easier to admit. Getting someone to admit that they are a racist is a lot harder! So, the first step is to create an enviornment that lowers the risk of even stating that you have a bias. In too many enviornments, admitting any bias is taken as a sign of weakness altohugh I’d argue that the people who recognize their biases are probably a bit further ahead from a thinking perspective than those who don’t.

    The broader issue is creating an environment where people are comfortable abaondoning those biases after an honest exploration of their beliefs and the facts.

  3. Hi Brad! One of my mentors gave me this very lesson, and it’s always stuck with me. He was a strong proponent of the whole-brain theory, and was not scared to surround himself with others that were willing to state their viewpoints on very disparate subjects. He told me to collect as much data as you can, via research, discussion, experience = work with your head. Then make your decision with your “guts”. To the uninformed that only read the last part, that seems like an off-the-cuff style of decision-making. But, what he was doing was exactly what you’re talking about in this post.

  4. Hey Chris,

    Welcome back to the world (where have you been lately?)

    It’s always great to see a leader who is able to make this happen. It’s much easier said than done.

  5. Thanks for noticing! I’ve been swamped with work (you remember my earlier job description), and have been scrambling with my grad class. I’m on my final project now, so in between business rules, ERD’s and SQL queries, I am catching up on your blog!
    Once again, you manage to write about something timely and pertinent for my job here. Thanks for doing it!

  6. where’s the Chief? Have you abandoned us?