You want to make better decisions to act more skillfully. But how? Seeing clearly is essential. It’s hard enough to get a good read on your context, but getting a good read on yourself is even harder. When it comes to self-assessing, we all have blind spots.
In episode 36 of Traction Heroes, Harry brought a short reading that explores this idea. It’s from Phyl Terry’s Never Search Alone, a book that has helped people I know with their job search. But our conversation didn’t focus on job hunting. Instead, we explored what Terry calls Kahneman’s conundrum, after celebrated psychologist Daniel Kahneman:
Kahneman says that he himself has no idea when he’s making any of the cognitive mistakes that he spent a lifetime identifying: ‘my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made the study of these issues.’
Whoops! Even the most prominent researcher on cognitive biases can’t effectively self-assess them. Terry continues,
Might there be a way for leaders to at least know when they’re about to make a mistake based on a bias? Kahneman says no. We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we’re about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.
Bottom line:
The knowledge of these biases does not seem to matter. The expert knowledge gained from decades of research does not even help the co-founder of the discipline. We humans are destined to make the same kinds of mistakes repeatedly, to be blind about our blind spots. It is simple but true. We all know that we can easily see the errors in others while being frustratingly blind to our own.
A conundrum indeed! What can we do about it? I suggested getting others’ perspective, whether a trusted colleague, friend, or mentor. Harry offered the Johari window as a tool for understanding what others think about us that we don’t know ourselves.
Continuing on the practical vein, I mentioned my experiment with using AI to illuminate my blind spots. Some folks pushed back on this as a sort of modern-day astrology (i.e., the language invites us to read into it), but I found ChatGPT’s ‘reading’ insightful.
However you do it, include others’ candid feedback into your decision-making process. Self-awareness alone won’t cut it.