Things have been hectic in my office this past week. Everyone is trying to close out projects before the holidays hit and that means the work moves a little faster than it should. In the speed and chaos of the season, I got to witness a real-life comedy of errors based on confirmation bias unfold. Two separate houses had a different understanding of a relationship and the months of continued discussion and investigation only allowed each party to separately confirm its own interpretation instead of taking the risk to expressly articulate each party’s position to the other and learn that we could be wrong.
In truth, the comedy wasn’t actually terribly funny, but it was full of errors and it made me realize how fighting against confirmation bias is a valuable tool as an attorney and in a corporate environment. Each side was drawn into the momentum of the developing relationship. Inertia took over and we both wanted to see what we wanted to see.
You can test your own proclivity for confirmation bias here. Ultimately, the lesson is that it isn’t a bad thing to be wrong, but it feels terrible. It feels so good to be right. As lawyers, part of our job is to see what can go wrong, issue spot, and identify risks, but we have to be right. The pressure to be the expert in the room with infallible judgment and perceptive analysis makes us extra susceptible to the charms of confirmation bias.
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What’s the problem with proving you are right? After all, you’re smart; you know what you’re doing. This is not your first rodeo. Besides, colleagues who aren’t as smart as you need to be persuaded (or educated) to come around to seeing things your way. That, right there, is the problem: confirmation bias prevents a person (and a company) from “confronting the brutal facts.” Jim Collins, in “Good to Great,” identified “confronting the brutal facts” as one of the characteristics Collins and his team identified in companies that went from good to great. If a person believes certain things about the world, the economy, an industry, a business relationship, or a client’s fact pattern, the default action of that person is to pursue evidence to support that belief. Confirmation bias prevents a person from confronting the brutal facts, which is a necessary element to improving the ecosystem of an organization (and arguably, also applicable to individuals).
So maybe you are willing to admit you might be wrong, even if only to yourself. How do you recognize when you are just seeing the world through a filter of thinking you are correct? Recognizing the potential for a bias already puts you on the right path. If you are aware that you could be incorrect, even though all signs you see indicate you are not, you can look for signs of flaws in your analysis. What has to occur for your plan or strategy to execute as you imagine? What happens if none of those occurrences executes as planned? Furthermore, why wouldn’t things happen the way you anticipate? With that last question of “why,” you can find the areas where confirmation bias might be blinding you to an accurate picture of the facts as they are, as opposed to what you want them to be.
It is never fun to be wrong, but it is better to be wrong early and use that position to develop a “right” position instead of being right in the tiny echo chamber of an organization and being wrong when you put your ideas out into the world.
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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].