The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

developments accelerate. But that just underlines the import ance of enhancing your ability to detect patterns. Beyond recognizing the dangers of limited and selective attention, it is crucial to understand that we are vulnerable to biases that impede our ability to perceive the most critical threats and opportunities. In The Black Swan , Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes that leaders continually fail to see significant yet unlikely threats (think of the 2008 global financial crisis) or opportun ities (the emergence of cryptocurrencies and blockchain as a transformational technology). 8 You won’t become great at pattern recognition if you’re unaware of your biases in collecting and interpreting informa tion. Kahneman calls the human mind “a machine for jumping to conclusions.” The absence of good information leads us to make assumptions. If those assumptions are reasonably good ones, and the costs are not too high if they turn out to be wrong, then this mental shortcut helps us navigate complex events with out having the complete picture. 9 It is essential, though, that you strive to avoid classic traps such as confirmation ​bias – ​the tendency to seek out new data that are consistent with your p​re-​existing viewpoints, or to recall evidence that confirms your existing theories. A related bias, called the “narrative trap,” is to perceive pat terns that simply aren’t there. We naturally try and “make sense” of complex, seemingly disparate events by constructing stories and ascribing cause and effect. To illustrate, consider the finan cial news media. Bank stocks are often said to boom “on the back of” an ​interest-​rate rise, but this analysis fails to account for coincidence or may not control for important contributing variables. Another version of confirmation bias is the halo effect , as

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