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In some organizations, the word “bias” has the same status as many other four-letter words; you need to avoid it in polite company. After all, leaders are supposed to be objective and data driven in their decisions and actions.
But bias is essential to decision making. In his book, “How We Decide”, Jonah Lehrer, tells the story of a man who struggled with simple decisions such as the color pen he should use or the radio station to which he should listen. The man’s problem stemmed from surgery where a part of his brain had to be removed. Interestingly, this was the same part of his brain that controlled his emotions. In other words, this man’s decision making ability became quite limited without bias/emotion. Lehrer concludes that we need both rational and an emotional (biased) thinking to make decisions. Trying to make decisions simply on facts comes nearly impossible. You can always gather more data or run more analyses. At some point, you need to make a choice – that’s where your bias comes in.
Instead of trying to remove bias, I believe that leaders should embrace it. This doesn’t mean that they should blindly act upon it. Instead, leaders should learn to use their bias to drive questions rather than answers. This is important for two reasons
1) A leader’s value comes from his or her bias. A leader’s bias is based on his or her experience. Experience and judgment is what sets leaders apart. If that shouldn’t be a part of decision-making, then every new employee would be equally qualified to lead.
2) Even if we wanted to, we can’t control our bias. Recent research on the brain shows that our brains operate too fast; often filtering information before we’ve even become conscious of it. The best we can do is learn to mitigate our bias.
So, what does a good “biased” leader do? He asks a lot of questions. He uses his bias as a basis for exploring his business and organization. He creates hypotheses and data experiments to confirm or refute his biases. That last part is important. A good leader doesn’t just look for data to confirm. A good leader is willing to recognize when the data does not support his view.
Good leaders also put their bias on the table. That’s different from what we are taught. We’ve been taught to not show our bias. But, since bias is unavoidable, most leaders wind up just masking it rather than removing it. As a result, analysis, decision-making, dialogue become inefficient and dysfunctional as people are working against forces that they can’t see or process. Instead, leaders can be upfront about their bias and invite their teams to provide opposing data. Some leaders take this even further and require that someone on the team provide an opposing view and data before they make a decision. That’s strong leadership.
Finally, good leaders surrounded themselves by people with opposing biases. This creates an appropriate level of checks and balances.
Your bias is probably what has gotten you to where you are today. If you continue to use it wisely, it will take you much further. Don’t shy away from your bias. Instead, use your bias to help make sense of data.
If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? How about this one? If your business is running on a daily basis but there is no data to measure it, does it have successes and failures?
Smarter people than me have pondered the first question – I’ll leave the answer to them. I’m more interested in the second question.
The answer obviously is “yes”. Your business has successes and failures, good decisions and bad decisions, and good luck or bad luck whether you have data to measure it. Data provides a way to capture the story of your business. But, it is not the story.
Too many leaders rely on data to tell them the story of their business. Data, of course, is important. But a good leader doesn’t allow the data to lead him or her. A good leader leads with the data as a supporting tool.
I once had a group of leaders review a marketing presentation. All of them came up with the same story. They focused on what the presentation said it would take to reach a new market segment. They simply summarized the facts in marketing presentation. They let those facts lead them. Their story was the same as anyone else inside or outside the company might tell. That’s not the real story. That’s not a story that drive decisions and actions. That’s just a summary of facts. The real story was the one that was occurring outside of the data in that presentation.
I asked them to revisit the presentation. But this time I had them start by thinking about business. The data in the presentation was going to be used to fill in the details of that story. How well were they positioned to capture this segment? Did their current business model align with how this particular segment made buying decisions? Was this segment worth capturing - it was big, but was it profitable, and if so, at what cost? What would they have to change in order to capture the segment? What might they lose? Were the needs of the new segment consistent with the needs of their existing customer base? If not, how would they reconcile the two? (Their original "story" from the marketing presentation didn't even talk about their existing customer base. They let the content of the presentation drive the scope of their story -- that's a mistake).Where have they had success in attracting this new segment?
Most of the information they needed to tell that story wasn’t in the presentation. It was in their existing understanding of the organization. They used the presentation to confirm or refute their existing beliefs about their organization. In other words, they told a story about their business that was supported by the data in the presentation. This story couldn’t be told by anyone who didn’t have knowledge of the company. This was their story.
The news story raised several questions and key issues that could drive decisions and actions. It was relevant. Also, in the process of coming up with that story, the leaders have much more powerful conversations about their business. They questioned assumptions and challenged one another. That didn’t happen the first time.
A good leader should always be thinking about the story that is unfolding in his or her business, the market, and the economy. That story is governed by internal decisions, customer behavior, and external factors (such as a recession). And, that is the story that drives the success or failure of a business.
Data might clarify some details of the story but it shouldn’t be a surprise. A leader who is surprised when a financial report tells him that his department is over budget is not paying attention to the story. Similarly, a leader who didn’t realize that her team was providing poor customer service until those scores went down is also asleep at the wheel.
Good leaders use data to tell a story. However, they don’t allow the data to set the scope and context for that story. They use their understanding of the business for that. The data should just fill in the details.
