This is another topic on the decision making process. In this topic I am focussing my attention on bias that may deeply impact the decisions. 

• We all suffer from it. It is our inclination towards or away from someone or something that takes us away from fairness, truth or optimal outcome 🥅. In a conversation, when we get to know strangers we may ask questions based on our assumptions. I once thought that a person who I was sure I have seen on the cover page of a magazine to be a drummer ( I was wanting to find a drummer to practice my saxophone with at that time and everyone famous seemed like a musician to me) . He was entrepreneur of the year as he owned the fastest growing company in his niche.

• Personally we carry our own bias and prejudices. In an organisation decision💡 making process is impacted as in addition to dealing with individual bias and prejudices, we have to account for how a group consists of individuals that are divergent from each other in decisions plus how far from truth they individually or collectively are. Sometimes truth is not known pre facto it is only known after outcome has been achieved but over/after a period of time.

• Speaking a bit mathematically🔢, bias pushes us away from the truth. Another measure is how similar or dissimilar we are where divergence amongst individuals measured as another parameter.

• How about we pick a particular type of bias, that I am hearing in press more often than other type of bias say #gender #bias in a corporate environment. I was in conversation with Incitec Pivot CEO Jeanne Johns who shared an interesting viewpoint that we may have a diverse organisation as a whole but as a team on a shop floor if we have a group of men (or women) then the benefits of diversity may not still be fully realised.

• On a different note in the decision making process the true diversity is valuable however we need to ensure that diversity permeates through each group and cluster and levels of hierarchy and not restricted total number of staff in an organisation.

• In decision making process as a group we may be close to the truth as we have may high divergence individually; collectively in group of individuals their bias cancel out. This is perhaps ideal scenario however as individuals in an organisational context may be same. ( unless there is a heavy flux of individuals) this is difficult to achieve. We need to map out the dimensions of ability of individuals and level of competence in each, then align with dimensions required for a decision and measure divergence in the group in terms of dimension of ability and level skill in each ability. 360 ⚙️ degree feedback is helpful to understand the dimensions of ability and level of skill .

• In an ideal world we would like to have low bias and low divergence in a group. This scenario is highly unlikely unless we are among a group of subject matter experts. I was in a group of specialist engineers listening into a conversation about how a scenario in building a type of bridge should be considered. It was unanimous outcome within seconds as the context was known to all and being from the same industry and similar background the bias as negligible and so was the divergence among the decision. There was a possibility of group think but more on that later.

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Reference: 

1. Business insider limits it to 20 key ones https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cognitive-biases-that-affect-decisions-2015-8?r=US&IR=T

2. Comprehensive list worth taking a glimpse at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cognitive-bias-infographic.html by designhacks.co .