How Biases Distort Our Beliefs (In The Workplace)

This episode is about how unreliable, nonobjective, and biased your and my thinking is. As sociologists and psychologists have long pointed out, we should develop a more skeptical and nuanced view of our own opinions.

In this episode, we explore eight biases and explore how they influence our beliefs in the workplace. A bias called "regression to the mean" can easily lead management to conclude that punishment for mistakes is more effective at producing desired behavior than rewards for achievements. The "survival bias" can lead people to conclude that certain methodologies or best-practices are successful purely because they only see the successes, but never the failures. Or "illusory superiority" leads to frustration and resentment because people feel that they are contributing more than others - as we all tend to do.

This episode is part of our "In-Depth" series. This means that we don't offer easy answers, but instead invite you to build a deeper understanding of how things work. Furthermore, we made an effort to dig deep into on-going scientific research. With this episode in mind, I'm sure you understand why we like Liberating Structures and Scrum so much. Or why we distrust "best practices".

This extra-long episode is based on this blog-post (all references are there):
https://bit.ly/30Je2Ni

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The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.