Blind auditions in a symphony are a common practice today.  But that wasn’t always the case.  Before the 80s, many symphony selection committees saw the person who was auditioning. They also saw a larger number of men than women moving forward from the auditions.  To combat this, the symphonies introduced the blind audition.

In a blind audition, a screen is placed between the musician and the committee.  The idea of a blind audition is that if there are data that you do not want used in a decision making process, they should not be provided.  This is a stroke of genius.  In business, we tend to do the opposite.  We provide way too much data and rely on others (or ourselves) to ignore the irrelevant information or focus on the relevant.  We know from psychology and neuroscience research over the past twenty years that humans are especially bad at focusing and filtering out irrelevant information.

However, while the blind auditions did succeed in getting more woman past the audition (a 50% increase in some cases), they didn’t always work.  As it turns out, the subtle “click click” of a woman’s heels is enough to introduce a gender bias during the audition. Interestingly, if you asked the people running the audition whether gender played a role in their decision, they would most likely say “no”.  Some would even tell you that they didn’t know the gender due to the screen.

We take in a lot more data subconsciously than we become aware of consciously.  We know from research on decision making that unconscious data play a significant role in our decisions without us even knowing.  Some symphonies now ask the musician to remove his or her shoes prior to walking out or have a carpet runner on the floor to muffle the sound of the footsteps.  This seems to have solved the problem.  Again, they found a way of removing data that they did not want used in the decision.

Leaders often tell me that they need to work on reducing or controlling their bias.  While this is a great aspiration, it’s impractical.  By the time we are aware of any data or information, most of our biases have already been applied.  The data have been unconsiously filtered, distorted, reshaped, and manipulated. We may be able to think more critically about what’s left, but most of the real “damage” of our bias has probably already been done.

We can take a lesson from the symphony. While you can’t control your biases, you can control how much data you make available to them.  The less extraneous data you provide, the less there is upon which your biases can act.

Next time you are working through an analysis or decision, pause for a moment to determine what data you actually need.  Then limit yourself to only reviewing that data.  And remember, “data” is any piece of information that can consciously or unconsciously impact your decision.  For example, will knowing the name of an employee influence how you rate his or her performance?  Can knowing the department, region or product that you are analyzing influence how you look at the results?  Will seeing a company’s logo on a proposal influence how you read that proposal?  If so (and by the way, the answer to all three questions is a resounding “yes”), you need to get rid of that information.

You can’t control your bias.  It is applied before you are even aware of the data upon which you’re are acting.  The best thing you can do is provide less fodder to feed those biases.