Usage

Bias Breakers help organizatons make better decisions by:

• Explaining cognitive bias in a simple, concise way
• Helping people recognize when cognitive bias is influencing decision making
• Recommending actions to take to minimize the impact of cognitive bias

Training is often ineffective as a solution to addressing cognitive bias. Our brains just work the way they work, and no amount of training is likely to change that. But, there are steps we can take to minimize the impact of cognitive bias.

• Keep people constantly aware of cognitive bias. Bias Breakers provide a fun way to do this. Leave them out where people can interact with them. The simple message will be memorable because of the monsters and colors. Organizations can develop their own games and practices for using the cards, such as holding them up in meetings when someone suspects bias influencing a decision, or assigning an individual in a discussion to monitor for potential bias and raise an issue when appropriate. This also helps focus the attention on the card and the issue, rather than the individual raising the issue.
• Build processes that reduce the reliance on people making the right decisions. People will always be influenced by cognitive bias. Raising awareness can help to minimize the impact cognitive bias has on decision making, but designing and following a process for decision making will have an even greater impact. Collect data that is used to make decisions rather than basing them on opinion alone. Define the steps that need to be taken to accomplish a task rather than relying on memory. Write things done and get agreement from others that these are the right steps to take. This can help you transition from people-dependent processes to processes that are repeatable and more likely to produce predictable results when used by anyone in your organization.
• Focus on your most important decisions. Hiring decisions, performance reviews, and project milestones are important and can have critical and longlasting impacts on organizations. Build processes around these first. Use Bias Breakers while creating and introducing the processes. Let people in your organization identify their own most important decisions and decide how best to apply Bias Breakers to them.

The key is to focus on the longterm development of repeatable processes that by default minimize the impact of cognitive biases. They are not dependent upon people choosing to make the right decisions. The right decision can be identified based on the information collected to support the decision and the agreed upon method of interpreting the data to make the decision. Awareness of cognitive biases can help organizations develop the right processes using the right data with the right interpretation.