Most leadership teams are aware that cognitive biases exist. Fewer have a working method for counteracting them in practice. Awareness, it turns out, is not a reliable corrective. Research on debiasing consistently shows that knowing about a bias does not reliably reduce its effect on your own judgments. What does help is structural: process design that makes the bias harder to act on.

Confirmation Bias in the Briefing Stage ¶

The most pervasive bias we encounter is confirmation bias, and it most often appears at the briefing stage. The person commissioning an analysis frequently has a preferred conclusion in mind. This shapes the questions they ask, the data they surface, and the framing they offer. We have learned to treat the initial brief as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a specification to be fulfilled, and to ask explicitly what evidence would change the client's view.

Anchoring in Forecast Reviews ¶

Anchoring is the tendency to rely too heavily on the first number encountered when making a subsequent judgment. In forecast review meetings, this typically means that the previous year's number becomes the implicit reference point for evaluating the new forecast, regardless of whether the underlying conditions have changed. We address this by presenting new forecasts without the prior year's figure visible until after the initial discussion.

Groupthink in Scenario Planning ¶

Scenario planning sessions are particularly vulnerable to groupthink, because the social dynamics of a room tend to converge on a small number of plausible futures. We use a structured technique in which participants generate scenarios independently before sharing them, which consistently produces a wider and more useful range of possibilities than open group discussion.

Building Process That Holds ¶

The goal of the Decision Under Uncertainty workshop is not to make participants aware of these biases, though that is part of it. The goal is to give teams a set of process tools they can use in their regular decision-making: specific meeting formats, specific question sequences, specific documentation habits that make the biases harder to act on without noticing.

The workshop is available as a one-day in-person session or remotely. If you are interested in running it for your leadership team, the notes from the practice page has more detail on the format and what previous participants have found most useful.