We All Have Biases - Just Don’t Let Them Control Your Business
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Construction leaders must make thousands of decisions each week. Some are routine, while others are more demanding. In either case, the decisions you make shape your business every day. In addition to scrutinizing your decisions themselves, I encourage you to scrutinize your decision-making process. The better you are at making decisions, the better decisions you will make. Let’s dive into how people make most decisions.
We all have biases. Our brains are hardwired to create shortcuts in decision-making, and most of these shortcuts are useful. There’s no reason to learn the same lessons repeatedly, right? The human mind is attuned to spotting patterns and thoughtlessly applying them to seemingly similar situations to save us time and energy. Another term for the decision-making processes influenced by our biases is heuristics. We’ve all developed a set of heuristics for the multitude of decisions we make each day. Should we bid on that project? Attend that conference? Hire that business developer? Pad our price with a little more margin? Go in at our break-even number? Most of these decisions are guided by subtle, and often highly valuable, lessons we’ve learned during our careers. Our heuristics are trying to help us, and we should be thankful for them most of the time.
When seeking to enact change, one problematic thing about our heuristics is their thoughtlessness. Without exploring our biases and their corresponding heuristics, we’re liable to make very flawed decisions.
Have you ever driven a vehicle with adaptive cruise control? That is the feature in newer model cars that automatically slows down and speeds up based on your proximity to the vehicle in front of you, based on your target speed. Due to my early exposure to this technology in Porsches and Audis (remember, I’m a car guy!), I learned to trust it in my twenties. Press this button and worry not, you will not rear-end the car in front of you if they happen to slow down or even stop. I’m convinced that my older brothers and my parents will never trust this tech, but I’ve proven its reliability time and again.
Their heuristic says, “You must control your braking in traffic, no matter what,” and mine says, “Set the cruise control and trust the process.” Who is right? Of course, my take is anecdotal, but I have two decades of evidence that mine is right. Who expends more energy driving? They do, for sure.
If you don’t learn to recognize your thoughtless patterns and the heuristics behind them, you may fail to take advantage of a host of opportunities to create a better result.
Over the next week, as you realize you’re making decisions, slow down. Take out a journal and document your thoughts as you reason through the decision at hand. Forcing yourself to examine your heuristics is a powerful way to become more mindful of the processes at work when you’re making decisions. I’ve done this and discovered all kinds of bugs in my decision-making process, which has helped me to install some alarms by sharing those bugs with my most trusted team members and advisors who can help me when I fail to recognize my patterns at work.
The Spark Notes:
Every decision you make as a construction leader—big or small—shapes your business, so improving your decision-making process is just as important as the decisions themselves.
We all rely on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, shaped by our experiences, and while they often serve us well, they can also lead to thoughtless, flawed decisions if left unexamined.
Recognizing and challenging these ingrained patterns—like my trust in adaptive cruise control versus my family’s skepticism—can reveal new opportunities and reduce wasted effort.
This week, slow down, journal your decision-making, and share your “bugs” with trusted advisors to install guardrails that keep your thinking sharp.
