It's how you know
Ever find yourself defending or selling something that should be inherently obvious and valued? For example, pleading with a teenager to wake up for school, or justifying why a bonus is not up to the expectations of an employee.
What’s up with this? How can school fall to the rank of burden? Why is a bonus expected regardless of business circumstances?
A lot of things we do don’t make sense.
This is when it’s time to Flip It.
How can group vs individual decision making be so different? Don’t think this is the case? Maybe you’ve heard something like this:
“We’re all underperforming, … except for me — and my team.”
I hear this almost as many times as I ask the question, “How’s performance?”
You know the story: A leader takes a stand declaring the obvious, “we’re underperforming…”, while protecting him or herself and compatriots, “except for me and my team.”
This is probably the most pervasive and frustrating psychological bias I come across in the work environment; evaluating and/or treating individuals differently from groups. It happens ALL the time.
But you can use this bias to influence an entire organization.
In psychology, ‘bias’ refers to predictable errors in perception. Here’s a simplified explanation of how bias works.
To start, everything we experience ‘beyond our skin’ is initially registered via our senses. After we sense something we begin to process it using our central nervous system, or brain (roughly speaking). This second process, resulting from the reception of the sensing process, is generally referred to as perception.
Once we perceive the input from our senses, a lot of “stuff” happens. Some of it is fully aware to us (i.e., conscious), some of it is not (i.e., unconscious). Whether conscious or unconscious, our brains actively interpret our (tasted, heard, seen, etc.) environment.
The interesting truth is: We don’t always interpret the “objective” world accurately. (We can know this because two people can perceive the same stimulus in different ways. If their is a ‘Truth”, both can’t be right; right?)