Overcoming biases

People often ask us how you know when it’s time to design your next business, and unfortunately there is no easy answer to that. While it’s easy to see in hindsight that you were too late, it’s always a challenge to predict how fast trends will become reality. When discussing the concept of business life cycles with your team and where you are on the curve it’s good to be aware of our human biases. In general, people tend to favor the status quo and underestimate the speed of change. Other human challenges for business innovation are the overconfidence bias, which is a hurdle for experimentation and learning, and the risk of groupthink. Groupthink is a threat for innovation because it leads to self-censorship. People don’t bring up alternatives, or potential risks, for fear of upsetting the team dynamics. 

How do you deal with uncertainty and human biases? Do you dare to admit what you don’t know and that you are prone to bias as well? Once you do, you can counterbalance them by designing a different approach to organizational learning and strategy development. There is no innovation without uncertainty. To be uncertain is to be open to change, it enables people to question the status quo and explore new directions. This is why we encourage you to embrace a beginner’s mindset; a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time. It's hard to acquire new insights when you’re certain of what you already know. Not only does business innovation require people to learn to embrace a different attitude, it also calls for a different approach to strategy development. Admitting that you never know when your business will be disrupted means you always need to be prepared for it. We invite you to not only develop a strategy for your current business, but also regularly design the future of your business. Improve your future-readiness by organizing innovation labs to address questions like “What if our current business would cease to exist – what would our future business look like?”.

Which of the human biases do you recognize in yourself and your team? How do you counterbalance them in business innovation?