Cognitive biases hold back organisational learning

"The first step in changing a culture is to understand how a leaders' thinking currently drives the system and how, therefore it currently drives performance."

Vanguard Consulting

There is a deeply entrenched three-way standoff between the untapped opportunity for businesses to embrace continual learning, the fears that prevent (many) leaders from committing to this and the way the role of the 'L&D' function is positioned. 

Having worked in and around this phenomenon for a number of years, I reflect that there are cognitive biases at play - for both leaders and their L&D teams. Here's my list of examples:

'Status quo bias' - The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also 'loss aversion' and 'system justification'). 

'System justification' - The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. 

'Ambiguity effect' - The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown. 

'Semmelweis reflex' - The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts a paradigm.

'Confirmation bias' - The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on, and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

'Illusion of control' - The tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.

'Plan continuation bias' - Failure to recognise that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different than anticipated. 

'Default effect' - When given a choice between several options, the tendency to favor the default one.

'Conservatism bias' - The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.

'Law of the instrument' - An over-reliance on familiar tools or methods, ignoring or under valuing alternative approaches. "If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail".

'Dunning-Kruger effect' - The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.

'Curse of knowledge' - When 'better-informed' find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people. 

'Framing effect' - Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how the information is presented.

'Hindsight bias' - Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along-effect", the tendency to see past events as being predictable.

'Irrational escalation' - The phenomenon where people justify increased investment, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

'Optimism bias' - The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating pleasing or favorable outcomes.

'Overconfidence effect' - Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions.

'Surrogation' - Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.

'Parkinson's law of triviality' - The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also know as 'bike-shedding', this bias explains why an organisation may avoid specialised or complex subjects.

'Bandwagon effect' - The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related group-think and herd behaviour.

'Courtesy bias' - The tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone.

Dynamic organisational learning strategy for mid sized companies

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