Before making an important decision, prudent managers evaluate the situations confronting them — and often fall into one of the eight traps of faulty thinking.
Some managers are too optimistic and overconfident: They overestimate success and underestimate the range of potential outcomes. On the flipside, other managers are cautious to a fault: They take costly steps to defend against unlikely outcomes.
These are just two of the well-documented psychological traps that ensnare most managers at some point in their careers. Other pitfalls that distort our reasoning abilities and cater to our biases are identified:
• We have a tendency to stick with the status quo.
• We only look for evidence that confirms our preferences.
• We are likely to throw good money after bad to defend our position and avoid admitting a mistake.
The way a problem is framed can influence how you develop solutions. To avoid this trap, you need to reframe the question in various ways to see how your thinking may change based on each version.
We can’t always avoid the distortions ingrained in the way our minds work, but we can build in tests to make our decision-making processes more reliable, thus improving the quality of the choices we make.
This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences.
There are two versions of this article: 2000 words and 1000 words (approximate word counts). The full article covers the following sub-topics:
The Brain Science of Decisions
The 8 Traps:
The Anchoring Trap
The Status-Quo Trap
The Sunk-Cost Trap
The Confirming-Evidence Trap
The Framing Trap
The Estimating and Forecasting Traps:
The Overconfidence Trap
The Prudence Trap
The “Recallability” Trap
There Are No “No-Brainers”
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As opportunities for global expansion increase, so does the trend toward more
diversity in the workplace. Successful companies are recruiting professionals
with different backgrounds, cultures, styles and motivations. Yet this great
resource presents increased possibilities for misunderstanding and cultural
blunders.
It is obvious that organizations will need to expand the capacity for people to
handle the challenges of working with other cultures if they are to participate
successfully. Those companies that continue to struggle with domestic diversity
will find themselves even more challenged.
People must move beyond simply accepting cultural identities and differences to
a place where they can be leveraged for competitive advantage, superior
performance and creative growth. There is tremendous creative energy and
innovation that can be harnessed when people from different perspectives work
successfully together.
Global business is challenging in large part because cultural habits and
attitudes blind people to other ways of doing things and make them unwilling or
unable to change.
The full 2,000-word article includes the following concepts:
Six dimensions to consider when doing business with a foreign culture
Different Ways of Doing Business
One Size Does Not Fit All
Leveraging Cultural Diversity
A List of Resources
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