You will build a short checklist to run before important decisions.
Pilots run through a checklist before every take-off, even after thousands of flights. They do not do it because they have forgotten how to fly. They do it because experienced people skip steps when they are busy, tired or confident, and a checklist catches the step before it matters. Lesson 5.1, Fast and slow thinking, made the same point about biases: knowing about them does not stop them, so the defence has to be a process. This exercise builds that process for you, in about twenty-five minutes.
Start by choosing the biases that show up most in the decisions you actually make. Not every bias matters equally for every job. A salesperson negotiating prices meets anchoring every day. A project manager lives with the planning fallacy. A manager writing performance reviews is most exposed to confirmation bias.
Go back through this module and the earlier ones, and list the biases and traps you have met: 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. Then think about the last five important decisions you made at work. Which of these was most likely at play in each? The three that come up most often are your starting point.
If you cannot decide, anchoring, confirmation bias and the planning fallacy are a sensible default for most office jobs, because estimates, reviews and plans are part of almost every role.
A checklist of bias names is useless in the moment. "Watch out for anchoring" gives you nothing to do. Each item has to be a question you can answer with a fact or a short sentence.
Here are examples drawn from the techniques in this module. For anchoring: what number did I hear first, and did I write my own estimate before I heard it? For confirmation bias: what evidence would change my mind, and have I looked for it? For the planning fallacy: how long did similar projects actually take, and does my estimate start from that? For availability: am I judging how likely this is from a count or from a memorable example? For "what you see is all there is": what important information am I missing, and could I get it before deciding?
Notice that each question points to an action. You can look up the past projects, write your own number first or go looking for the disconfirming evidence. That is what makes a question usable.
Keep the list to five questions or fewer. A longer checklist feels thorough and then gets skipped. Five questions take two or three minutes to answer, which is short enough to do before every decision that matters. If you have more candidates than five, keep the ones that cover your three main biases and drop the rest, or swap them in later after your quarterly review in lesson 8.3, Review your decisions every quarter.
A checklist you have never tested is a guess. Before you rely on it, run it against a decision from the past month or two whose outcome you already know, and see what it would have caught.
Mei, from earlier in this module, builds her checklist from anchoring, confirmation bias and the planning fallacy, and adds two more questions on availability and missing information. She tests it on a decision from last month: choosing a vendor to build a reporting dashboard for a client. The vendor was eventually late and over budget.
What number did I hear first? The vendor quoted six weeks in the first call, and every later discussion of timing started from it. Caught. What would change my mind, and did I look? She had decided early that this vendor was the strongest. She never called the reference who had worked with them on a similar dashboard. Caught. How long did similar projects take? She did not check. Two earlier dashboards with other vendors had taken ten to twelve weeks. Caught, and the most costly miss. Am I judging from a count or a memory? Not much at play here, since the decision was not about how common something was. Nothing caught. What am I missing? She had no information about the vendor's current workload, which turned out to be the main reason for delay. Partly caught: she might not have found out, but she would at least have asked.
Four of five questions point to something she could have done differently. That is a good sign the checklist fits her work. If your test catches nothing, either the decision was well made or your questions are aimed at the wrong biases. Try a second past decision before deciding which.
Put the checklist somewhere you will see it at the moment of deciding: pinned in your notes app, at the top of your decision journal from Module 8, or on a card on your desk. Decide in advance which decisions trigger it. A simple rule works, such as any decision 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, will give you a sharper way to draw that line.
A finished checklist has no more than five questions, each tied to a bias you named, each answerable with an action, plus a note on what it caught when you tested it. In the activity below you will write yours and run it against one decision from the past month.
Write a five-question bias checklist and apply it to one decision you made in the past month.
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