The most common question I’m asked in my Rethinking Data workshop is how to become better at reducing bias and making data-driven decisions.

There is a short answer and long answer to that question.

The short answer is that you can’t really become better at reducing your bias.  Most of your bias is applied unconsciously and therefore you have little control over it.  However, there is a way to minimize the effects of those unconscious biases. Don’t “feed” them so much data.  The more data you review at once, the more your unconscious biases have to work with.  And they will.  Reduce the data, you reduce the bias.

The longer answer is a bit more interesting.  While you can’t become better at reducing your bias, you can get better at recognizing when it’s kicked in and then slow down your thinking.  This requires keen self-awareness.

We all have triggers that reduce our ability to think clearly.  Those triggers come from several places.  Many of them are rooted in stress (deadlines, having your credibility challenged) or emotion (being strongly tied to a recommendation or cause, being angry or frustrated).  Others are based on familiarity and experience. The more familiar we are with something (i.e., the more expectations we have about how it will work), the less we tend to think about it and the more we tend to mold new data to our old beliefs.

Understanding your triggers and recognizing when they may be in play are critical to improving your decision making.

The vacation dilemma

Recently I made travel reservations for myself and my family.  The reservation included the flight, a car, and a hotel.   I entered my personal information for the flight. Then I got stuck.  I couldn’t figure out how to add the rest of my family.  After some poking around, I finally found the “add” button.  It was not very intuitive. It made me question whether this company had really thought through their system design.

After entering my family’s flight information, I was ready to add the hotel.  When the hotel form came up, all of the fields were blank.  I was frustrated.  Why didn’t they pull my name and address from the airline reservation?  That’s computer science and process design 101!  I entered my information again and then proceeded to the car rental reservation.  Again I received a blank form.  At this point I was pretty frustrated with this website and this company.  Finally, I finished the reservation and clicked on “submit”.

Things took a turn for the worst when I received the confirmation email.  For some reason, the system overwrote my airline information with the information that I entered for the rental car.  The problem was that for the airline I used my full name (so it would match my ID) and for the rental car I only used my nickname.  My ID and ticket no longer matched.  This further worsened my impression of this company.

I immediately called customer service.  I asked if they could fix my airline reservation.  They couldn’t.  It turns out that it’s against the law to alter the name on a reservation by more than two letters.  The agent told me that she could cancel the reservation and remake it under the correct name.  It took her longer to do that than it took me to make the entire reservation in the first place.  This decreased my confidence even more.  At the end of the call I asked if I was going to be charged a cancellation fee.  She assured me that I wouldn’t.  Given my past experience with the airlines, I was confident that she was mistaken.

The next day, I checked my credit card statement on-line.  There, right in front of me, just as I expected, was a $25 charge from the airline. I was ready to call the company back but decided to slow down my thinking (I’ve begun to recognize my triggers).  Perhaps I was jumping the gun. I clicked on the transaction to get more information.  It still only said “Service Fee” so that didn’t provide any insight.  However, I noticed something strange.  The transaction date for the fee was three days prior to when I made the reservation.  To someone clear-headed that would have been enough data to clarify the situation.  But to someone who was in an emotional and biased state, that data just added fuel to the fire.  My first thought was, “Their systems are so bad they can’t even get the date right.”  Remember, my past experience (which was data driven) was that 1) this company did not have very effective systems and 2) that I usually get charged a fee when I cancel or change an airline reservation.  My conclusion seemed logical and rational at the time.

Fortunately, I still had a small feeling that I was missing something (my self-awareness was kicking in).  I decided to step away for a few minutes and come back to it.  As soon as I did I “remembered” something.  Three days earlier I checked my father-in-law in for a flight and paid his $25 baggage fee.

Slow down your thinking

Three years ago, I probably would have immediately called the company to complain.  The more that I teach and work with leaders on the decision making, the more aware I have become of my own thinking errors and when I am most likely to make them. That has allowed me to slow down my thinking and question my conclusions.

The most important skill for making better data-driven decision making is self-awareness.  If you read this story thinking that you’d never make such an obvious mistake, you too might need some work on your self-awareness.  My mistake was obvious because you were looking at it from the outside in.  However, you regularly make similar obvious mistakes.  We all do. You just don’t see them.  It’s a result of how our brains work.

After many years, I’ve gotten pretty good at not only catching my mistakes but I take the time to review them.  I explore not only where I went wrong but why I went wrong.  That has made me into a more effective decision-maker.

You can’t stop your brain from applying its biases.  However, if you understand the situations in which your biases tend to take over and if you recognize when you are in those situations, you can slow yourself down.  While it won’t stop you from making the initial bad decision, it will prevent you from immediately acting upon it.  That’s when your decision-making will start to improve.

——————————

Brad Kolar in an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors.  He can be reached at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com. Avail’s Rethinking Data workshop will help your team become more efficient and effective data-driven decision makers.