Don’t Let Bias Block Change

Find out where people are coming from to get them where you’re going Suppose you were caught on the edge of a cliff, being pursued by an angry elephant. Would you stand and fight? Or jump off into the abyss? If you’re like most people, you’d choose the elephant. When faced with a choice between the known and unknown, humans cling to the information gained from past experiences. This has allowed us to make reasonable projections and act accordingly. But it also makes it difficult for us to accept change. When you roll out a new initiative or IT solution, then, you can count on some folks to resist it. It’s easy to write off change-averse people as timid, or stubborn, or old-fashioned. But you’d be missing out on the why . If you want to get around roadblocks to change, learn why they were constructed in the first place. What Is Cognitive Bias? The human brain’s creative side may mislead us into thinking that we have the power to dream up novel scenarios or make wholesale leaps of faith. But the truth is, people can only operate from information they already have. We learn new things all the time, but we can only make sense of them based on what’s already in our memory banks. This is why “the devil you know”—in our case, the elephant—usually wins over the unknown, or whatever lies at the bottom of that cliff. There may be a lovely oasis down there, with a soft mattress to break our fall. But because we know that elephants like peanuts and drink with their trunks, we’re more comfortable jousting with them. In the office, your coworker Jean might not know why she doesn’t like the idea of the new computer program. She might not even […]

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