More than XP. More than one day.

Have you ever felt like you’re surrounding by a group of crazy people making insane decisions?

Sometimes we put this down to office politics, but that doesn’t actually help us deal with it.

In this session you’ll get a chance to learn about biases that affect the way people think. We’ll use this knowledge to develop an understanding of these difficult situations. Why did they occur? What can we do to prevent them happening again? And, given that we too are people, what can we do to improve our own decisions?

What are cognitive biases?

Experiments in cognitive science and social psychology have revealed a wide variety of biases in areas such as statistical reasoning, social attribution and memory. It’s argued these biases are common to all human beings, and some have been demonstrated to hold across very different cultures.

Cognitive biases were first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They claim biases are artifacts of problem-solving heuristics humans use. Recent work on cognition in other animal species reveals that some cognitive biases are not unique to humans, suggesting an evolutionary origin.

Whatever the mechanisms behind cognitive bias, we have good data to suggest that under some circumstances we all have a tendency to react in a way that seems surprising when viewed from a more detached perspective.

Example cognitive biases

• Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to Groupthink.
• Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains
• Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
• Anchoring - the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions

Why join this workshop?

• Get some “closure” on frustrating or puzzling past experiences.
• Gain a deeper understanding of human decision-making and its weaknesses.
• Perhaps discover strategies for coping better with such situations in future.

Workshop format

The goal of the workshop is to formulate explanations for puzzling situations that are based on what we currently understand of cognitive biases. We hope that we’ll learn something about these situations, understand them better, and perhaps discover ways in which we can deal with similar situations in future.

For most of the time we will work in a small group to explore a particular question. For example: why would an organization resist changes that appear to make perfect sense? Each working group will produce a summary of their findings in poster form and present it back to the other groups.

We’ll be on hand throughout the workshop to help with explaining particular biases, but we hope that the list we’ve chosen will be fairly self-explanatory.

Process

1. After the introduction and explanation of what cognitive biases are, participants will form small groups (ideally 4 people). We’ll explain what kind of scenarios we’re looking for – ones in which puzzling or seemingly irrational decisions were made – and then everyone will have a few minutes to think of the scenarios they’d most like to understand.

2. Each person in the group will describe the scenario as briefly as they can. Hopefully it will be clear to the other members of their group why it was so puzzling, but there will be a little time to ask questions and explore the scenario. We’d like this to be brief.

3. Having heard each scenario, we’d like the group to decide which one they want to explore as a group. This scenario will be used for the rest of the workshop (unless we have a longer workshop duration, in which case we may do 2). We have a couple of “spare” scenarios for groups that can’t think of one, but they weren’t needed last time.

4. Next we need to look at the “playing cards”. Each group will have cards divided into “suits” (we’re aiming for 4 suits) that roughly correspond to major groups of biases. The individual cards explain particular biases to which we know all people are prone. Each person in the group will pick one suit and spend a few minutes studying the cards. This divides the work of understanding the many possible biases among the group’s members. It’s ok to ask questions about the biases during this time – we’ll try to answer with examples or clarifications.

5. Now we move into the main work of the workshop. The scenario is retold in more detail and with more exploratory questions. Each group member can “play” a cognitive bias card they hold whenever they think it’s possible a bias may have influenced what they are hearing about. Playing a card involves saying what the bias on the card is and why they think it might apply here. Playing a card might cause other people to play their cards. Each card can be played any number of times, and it’s important for the player of a card to make a note of what element of the scenario caused the card to be played. Any number of cards can be played at any time in the scenario.

6. Each group will now have accumulated notes of possible biases affecting people in the scenario. The next stage is to try to make sense of the bigger picture. Each group will do that by creating a simple systems diagram showing possible effects at work and relationships between them. We will stop to explain systems diagrams very briefly before doing this and will be on hand to help groups as they try to build up a big picture. It isn’t necessary to include every bias card that was played, but it is important to try to create that big picture.

7. The final stage of the workshop is for each group to create a poster of their conclusions (usually just the systems diagram) and talk the other groups through their scenario and what they made of it.

At the end we will have some time for reflection:

• What did you learn about the scenario and is it useful?
• What did you learn about cognitive biases and is it useful?
• Did you learn anything else?

One possible extension is to brainstorm strategies for coping with or mitigating bias effects in future.

History

We’ve previously run this session at SPA 2007 and are incorporating feedback and new ideas arising from that session. The poster outputs and wiki page for that session are available.

You can find the current list of biases we’re using here but we’ll be adopting the “playing card” idea and reworking this list a little.