Mindtraps - how agility can help with our bias
We like to believe that we make conscious and fair decisions, we trust our intuition, we follow logical thinking and common sense. But what if our choices could be easily influenced, what if our intuition was nothing more than an effect of the laziness of our brain and what if logical thinking was harder than we expect? Our minds, which drive all of these processes, are complex and despite vast scientific research we still don't understand how they work.
Anchoring, halo effect, availability heuristic, attribute substitution, negativity bias, the law of small numbers, Dunning–Kruger effect are just a few of the phenomena that create traps for our minds. Are we defenceless when we face these traps? Fortunately not! It turns out that agility brings some tools and techniques to help us.
In this talk, we will explore various types of biases and heuristics that our minds use every day. We will perform experiments and learn from the research of the last 60 years. We will also look at some tools and techniques that agility brings and we will see how we can use to help ourselves, our teams and organisations.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
In this talk we will explore topics from behavioral science, in order to understand how our minds work. We will use short experiments (1-2 minutes), based on the actual research experiments used in the field of behavioral science, in order to experience biases and heuristics our minds use every day to make decisions.
This talk will likely run like this:
00:00-00:05 - Welcome, introduction to the talk
00:05-00:10 - Overview of how our minds work - System 1 and System 2, their function and their characteristics.
00:10--:00:30 - Walk through different kinds of biases and heuristics our brains use. This part will include experiments and overviews of:
- halo effect
- WYSIATI - What You See Is All These Is
- anchoring
- availability heuristic
- attribute substitution
- negativity bias
- law of small numbers
- Dunning–Kruger effect
- hot hand - a cognitive illusion
00:30 - 00:40 - Examples of tools from the agility toolbox and how they can help us avoid the discusses biases and heuristics. This part will include:
- liberating structures
- system thinking
- reflections/retrospectives
- investing in solving a problem over funding projects
- internal motivators over external motivators
- planning poker
- relative sizing
00:40-00:45 - Q&A and Closing
This talk would be delivered at the local Agile Auckland meetup in November 2019 as a test run before the conference. It has also been submitted to the Toronto Agile Conference 2019 (submission results would be announced in September 2019).
Learning Outcome
After the talk the audience will be able to:
- Recognise different types of cognitive biases, how they work and how they influence our behaviour
- Understand how agility helps alleviate the effect of cognitive bias
- Implement tools and techniques that can mitigate the risks of bias
- Design and facilitate workshops that would help the participants avoid making decisions based on the cognitive bias.
Target Audience
Agile Coaches, Leaders, Scrum Masters, Change Managers, Organisational Psychologists, Team Facilitators, Executives, Team members
Prerequisites for Attendees
No prerequisites for attendees.
Links
While behavioural science is not a new topic, I believe looking at it through the lenses of agility is relatively novel and I haven't found many materials about this subject. Here are some of the books, articles and videos I base my talk on:
- "Thinking, Fast and Slow" book by Daniel Kahneman
- "Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want " book by Nicholas Epley
- "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions." book by Dan Ariely
- http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg
- https://medium.com/leadership-motivation-and-impact/what-i-learned-from-thinking-fast-and-slow-a4a47cf8b5d5
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZv--sm9XXU
Author's recordings of the previous talks:
AgileNZ 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrMw6hneYq4&t=5s
GeeCon 2014: https://vimeo.com/100289910
On top of that, the author presented at: Business Information Systems conference 2011, EmpiRE conference 2012 and local meetup - Agile Auckland meetup in 2018 and 2019 and Auckland Agile Coaching meetup in 2018 and 2019.
Links to slides from author's previous presentations (on different topics than the one proposed here)
- https://www.dropbox.com/s/odxezatselsot4f/AgileAuckland_2018_Improv.pdf?dl=0
- https://www.dropbox.com/s/33dc5tktpt4ukd7/coaching-dojo-2.pdf?dl=0
- https://www.dropbox.com/s/td12jkorwny6zmw/emotional-culture-meetup-workshop.pdf?dl=0
Author's blog: https://medium.com/@jjurkiewicz
schedule Submitted 1 year ago
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