Cognitive Bias In the IT Department
HBR’s article on cognitive bias is part of a decade-long trend. Memes like “Everything you know is wrong” appear in songs, books and movies; popular books like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and David McRaney’s “You Are Not So Smart” all suggest that one’s every attempt at rational analysis is being self-undermined at every turn. It’s possible that this theme says something about Western society. We are suffering a crisis of confidence because the billions in developing nations have actually just about emerged and are breathing down our necks. The recovery from the financial crisis has become so prolonged, we’re afraid we’ve lost our free enterprise magic, we’re just G20 among 200. But that’s more within HBR’s purview; I on the other hand see how the global scope of the article applies on the micro scale, inside the IT department.
Availability
The first trap described in the article, availability bias, may be summarized by the old cliché “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. The challenge in IT is particularly acute because we are so invested in our hammers. For many managers escaping the bias requires simply acknowledging its existence. As soon as you recognize that there are other ways of looking at a problem you can benefit from the wider perspective and adjust your approach accordingly. There may be established mindsets to overcome, and processes based on the old idea that have their own momentum; but these are overcome as more managers embrace the new perspective. In IT we have acquired our hammers with specialized training and years of practice, and have baked them into our corporate systems. We key on the situations where our technical skills and experience have the most value, because these validate our past decisions to take the paths we have. If I have achieved recognition at my company for the solutions I’ve delivered as a .Net architect, it take more than recognition of the superiority of Ruby on Rails, say, to adopt that framework. It’s a lot more than a mindset that has to change, it’s technical skills and corporate infrastructure also.
Confirmation
Confirmation bias – We see what we want to see – is the second trap and, for similar reasons, IT has a particular challenge to escape it – but also one advantage. We labor to acquire our skills which are optimized for certain environments and for solving certain kinds of problems; and we see their value evaporate as a new technology supersedes the old and renders obsolete our hard won knowledge and experience. This is hard to acknowledge when it happens; but in technology we also have a culture that embraces innovation. The trick is to adopt a perspective where new or different approaches don’t repudiate the old, but extend it. Especially in the unstable environment of IT where skill sets are more volatile than in just about any other field, new ideas can be perceived as a threat to one’s status, political power and marketability. It can take some effort to beat back those fears and call up the spirit of innovation in order to see and grasp the opportunity.
Variance
IT managers should be especially attuned to signs of the third trap, variance bias. Some corporate departments need to grasp the full range of the cultures and personalities that populate the market to be successful. You can scarcely run an effective sales or marketing team if you expect your targets to be just like you. But in IT, for all that we also deal with diverse clients, we still tend to adopt a narrow view of human variation. There’s a little truth to those computer nerd clichés: we cluster in the conscientious quadrant of the DISC graph, we tend towards the INTJ corner of the Meyers Briggs chart. That homogeneity leads us to judge our users poorly for their grasp of skills and perspectives we shouldn’t expect them to hold. We talk about “stupid user tricks” and sneer at them for having to have a simple state chart explained. Even within IT we’re narrow-minded: I’ve seen database managers lose patience with those who don’t immediately grasp the role of normalization in a relational model, while dismissing the XML architect’s insistence on a hierarchical view. IT professionals of all stripes need to be mindful and respectful of the perspectives and skills of others, internally and externally, or we wind up developing the solutions that seem obvious and elegant to us rather than what is most intuitive and useful for the actual users.
A mentor once advised me that the higher one climbs in the hierarchy, the greater the need to be thinking all the time. You can’t coast in the C-suite. He was talking about evaluating operational metrics and analyzing the environment in search of opportunities to grow the business; but I think he would have agreed that you need to be continually questioning the very thought processes you use to arrive at your conclusions.
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