Cognitive Biases in Decision Making

Cognitive Biases in Decision Making – Live Virtual / Face to Face Delivery

Our Cognitive Biases in Decision Making Program is designed to help individuals understand and mitigate common cognitive biases that can impact decision-making. The program aims to enhance decision-making skills by raising awareness of these biases and providing strategies to overcome them. Here is a summary of the program:

Objective: The program’s main objective is to equip individuals with knowledge about cognitive biases and their impact on decision-making, enabling them to make more rational and informed choices.

Identification of Cognitive Biases: Participants are introduced to a range of common cognitive biases that can distort thinking and lead to irrational judgments. Examples include confirmation bias, anchoring bias, availability heuristic, overconfidence bias, framing effect, sunk cost fallacy, bandwagon effect, and hindsight bias.

Awareness and Self-Reflection: Participants learn to recognize when cognitive biases may be influencing their decisions. Through self-reflection and examination of past decisions, individuals gain insights into their own thinking patterns and potential biases at play.

Strategies for Mitigation: The program provides participants with practical strategies to counteract cognitive biases. These strategies may include actively seeking diverse perspectives, considering alternative viewpoints, gathering more information, challenging assumptions, and making decisions based on evidence and logical reasoning.

Decision-Making Exercises: The program may include interactive exercises and case studies to reinforce learning and allow participants to apply their knowledge of cognitive biases in decision-making scenarios. This hands-on approach helps individuals practice identifying biases and implementing strategies to make more rational choices.

Ongoing Support: The program may offer ongoing support, such as resources, tools, or follow-up sessions, to help participants continue applying their learnings and addressing cognitive biases in their decision-making processes.

By participating in the Cognitive Biases in Decision Making Program, individuals can develop a greater understanding of how cognitive biases can impact decision-making and gain the skills necessary to make more rational, informed choices. Ultimately, the program aims to enhance critical thinking and decision-making abilities, leading to better outcomes in various personal and professional contexts.

We are all subject to cognitive biases in our decision-making. These, coupled with leader’s tendency to be over-confident in their ability to make decisions, is a formula for making decisions based on the past, familiarity, emotions and comfort.

This engaging workshop builds on the foundational unconscious bias workshop, and asks participants to reflect on recent decisions, analyze them for cognitive biases, and create a strategy for making more grounded decisions moving forward.

The benefit of this inquiry are to make decisions that support the business strategy rather than keep leaders comfortable, drive employee engagement and connectivity and build strategic mindset of leaders by freeing them up from decisions which can be pushed down. This workshop also introduces a decision accountability model that brings clarity to the decision process.

Unconscious cognition is essential to human functioning; it helps us to be efficient and responsive to the world around us. However unconscious processes are also prone to errors; errors that remain unrecognised and uncorrected and which can lead to flawed decision-making, significant bias and blinkered thinking. Even the most passionate advocates of inclusive practices can – and do – have unconscious biases that mean that they respond to diversity of both ideas and people differently. These impact on the way we view the world, the way we view ourselves and hence the way we behave. While we can’t necessarily change our unconscious cognition, becoming aware of its potential consequences can have a profoundly positive effect on organisational culture, the quality of decision making, gender targets, HR processes and employee satisfaction.

Our Directors are the only Australians accredited in the use of the Diversity Australia’s Unconscious Bias Cognition Assessments which means we’re well equipped to help organisations connect their cultural aspirations with the individual’s understanding of his or her psychological processes.

We support clients to explore the ‘danger points’ for unconscious cognition in their organisation both through the use of the Diversity Australia’s Unconscious Bias Cognition Assessments tool and through:

Inclusive leadership workshops for senior leaders, middle managers and line managers.
Unconscious cognition seminars for larger groups.
Presentations or keynotes on unconscious cognition and inclusive workplaces.

We’re not completely at the mercy of unconscious cognition – just because something is outside of our awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of our control. But as long as it remains a mystery, the thinking that’s going on without our knowledge will continue to hinder diversity, inclusion, the quality of our decision making and the ability to effect sustainable cultural change.

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