Build a short checklist to run before important decisions.
Before an important work decision, answer a short list of questions you wrote for yourself, each aimed at a bias you know you fall for. Building the list and trying it out takes about twenty-five minutes. Using it on a real decision takes two or three minutes.
Airline pilots go through a checklist before each take-off, whether they have flown a handful of times or thousands of flights. Nobody assumes they've forgotten how to fly. Skilled people leave steps out when they are rushed, worn out or sure of themselves, and the checklist picks up the missing step while it can still be fixed. Lesson 5.1, Fast and slow thinking, showed that being aware of a bias doesn't protect you from it, so your protection has to come from a process you follow. A checklist is that kind of process.
Different jobs expose you to different biases. Someone in sales who haggles over prices runs into anchoring daily. A project manager deals with the planning fallacy on almost every schedule. A manager doing performance reviews is most at risk from confirmation bias.
To find yours, look back through this module and the earlier ones and write down every bias and trap the course has introduced. So far that means anchoring, confirmation bias, availability, the planning fallacy, "what you see is all there is", sunk costs from lesson 2.3, base rate neglect from lesson 3.3 and survivorship bias from lesson 3.4. Next, pick the five most important decisions you've made at work recently. Beside each, write the bias that was most likely affecting you. The three that turn up most often are the ones your checklist should cover.
When nothing stands out, go with anchoring, confirmation bias and the planning fallacy. Nearly every office job involves estimates, reviews and plans, which is where those three show up.
Bias names on a card don't help you when you're about to decide. A note saying "watch out for anchoring" leaves you with no next move. What helps is a usable checklist question: one you can answer with a fact or a short sentence, and which sends you to do something specific, such as looking up past projects, writing down your own number before anyone else's, or searching for evidence against your view.
Each of the following comes from a technique taught in this module:
Anchoring: what number did I hear first, and did I write my own estimate before I heard it? Confirmation bias: what evidence would change my mind, and have I looked for it? Planning fallacy: how long did similar projects actually take, and does my estimate start from that? Availability: am I judging how likely this is from a count or from a memorable example? "What you see is all there is": what important information am I missing, and could I get it before deciding?
Limit yourself to five questions at most. A long checklist looks thorough, and people quietly stop using it, whereas five questions take two or three minutes to get through. If you end up with extra candidates, keep the ones covering your three main biases and set the others aside. You can bring one in later, after the quarterly review in lesson 8.3, Review your decisions every quarter.
Until you've tried the checklist, you don't know whether it works. Choose a decision from the past month or two where you already know how things turned out. Go through the questions as though you were back at that point, and note what each one would have flagged.
Mei, from earlier in this module, wrote her checklist around anchoring, confirmation bias and the planning fallacy, then added a question on availability and one on missing information. For her test she used last month's choice of vendor to build a reporting dashboard for a client. The project ended up late and over budget.
Anchoring flagged a problem. In the first call the vendor said six weeks, and every timing conversation after that began from six weeks. Confirmation bias flagged one too: early on she had made up her mind that this vendor was the best option, and she never rang the reference who had worked with them on a similar dashboard. The planning fallacy question exposed her most expensive mistake. She never looked at how long comparable work had taken, and her two previous dashboards, built by other vendors, took ten to twelve weeks.
Availability found nothing, since the choice had little to do with how often something happens. The question on missing information found something in part. She knew nothing about how busy the vendor was at the time, and that workload turned out to be the main cause of the delay. Asking might not have got her an answer, but she would have raised it.
Four of the five questions point to something Mei could have done another way, which suggests the checklist suits the work she does. If your own test flags nothing, there are two possibilities: the decision was a sound one, or your questions are aimed at the wrong biases. Run the checklist on a second past decision before you settle which it is.
Keep it somewhere you'll see it at the moment you decide: pinned in a notes app, at the top of your decision journal from Module 8, or on a card on your desk.
Settle beforehand which decisions call for it. An example rule is to use it on anything involving more than a set amount of money, more than a week of anyone's time, or anything hard to reverse. Lesson 6.1, One-way doors and two-way doors, gives you a sharper way to set that rule.
Your finished checklist has five questions at most, each linked to a named bias and each answerable with an action, along with a note of what it caught in your test. In the activity below you will write yours and run it against one decision from the past month.
Write a five-question bias checklist. Run it on one decision you made in the past month.
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