How Leaders Can Balance Work and Life to Survive and Thrive During This Pandemic

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has changed life as we know it, as well as how we manage our households.

While being shut mostly in our homes or observing infection prevention guidelines when leaving our house, it can be pretty hard to grapple with the reality of the world in which we now live. And yet, this is what you as a leader must do to survive and thrive in this new abnormal.

Same Home, Different House Rules?

Susan, an entrepreneur and former coaching client of mine, reached out for help because her household was having difficulty adjusting to the long-term impact of our new pandemic reality. As the founder of a quickly-growing startup in the medical devices industry, she was used to a routine and thrived by keeping her work life separate from her personal life.

However, as the months of staying at home went by, her relationship with her husband, who was the primary caretaker of their nine-year-old child pre-pandemic, started to erode. She found it difficult to concentrate on her startup due to frequent interruptions from her husband and child, and she found herself becoming more and more curt with them.

It was hard enough when school was canceled in the early months of the pandemic, as well as summer camp. And it became increasingly impossible when her son’s school transitioned to online only for the Fall. When I met with Susan over Zoom, I told her that there were some essential steps that she needed to take to adjust to the new COVID-19 reality.

How Your Household Can Survive and Thrive in the Pandemic

First and foremost, we won’t get anywhere if we don’t face the facts. We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 fundamentally disrupted our world, turning it upside down in a few short weeks in February and March 2020. We have to move past the normalcy bias‘s discomfort and our intuitive feeling that the world should go back to normal.

The normalcy bias is one of over a hundred dangerous judgment errors that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired.

So how can your household effectively overcome the normalcy bias to adapt to the uncertainty and dislocation that accompanies this new abnormal?

While you’re in a new abnormal, your underlying needs and wants remain the same. You just need to figure out different ways toward satisfying them.

You might have heard of Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation and the pyramid of needs based on his work. More recent research, summarized in Scott Barry Kaufman’s excellent book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, revises this model. Kaufman shows that our fundamental needs consist of safety, connection, and self-esteem, and we will feel deprived without them. We also have needs that help us achieve our full potential through personal growth. This is what Maslow called “self actualization” and what Kaufman more clearly defined as exploration, love, and purpose. A good approach to adapting to the new abnormal is evaluating your life through the lens of these needs and ensuring that you can still satisfy them.

Connection to Others

The most challenging element for Susan stemmed from the fundamental need for connection to others. It’s a topic I describe in more depth in my best-seller, The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships.

First, consider your immediate connections with members of the household.

If you have a romantic partner in your household, you’ll have to figure out how to interact healthily, given that you’re together 24/7. You’ll likely get into each other’s spaces and on each other’s nerves. It’s much wiser to anticipate and work out these problems in advance than have them blow up down the road. The same principle applies to other members of your family. If you have older children who moved home after university closed, or younger children who aren’t going to school after it closed, you’ll need to figure out how to deal with them cooped up inside. This includes staying in touch with their schools to get updates on online school work.

You’ll have to put more thought into dealing with older adults over 60 or anyone with underlying health conditions in your household (including yourself if you fit either category). Given their much greater vulnerability to COVID-19, you and other members of your household need to take serious measures to prevent them from getting ill. That means being more careful yourself than you might otherwise be since over half of all those with COVID-19 have no or light symptoms.

Second, what about your connection to those you care about who aren’t part of your household? Your romantic partner might not be part of your household. Depending on how vulnerable to COVID-19 you and other members of your household might be, you might choose to take the risk of physical intimacy with your romantic partner. But you have to make this decision consciously rather than casually. Or you might decide to have a social-distance relationship, meeting at a distance of 10 feet or by videoconference.

During one of our coaching sessions, Susan said she hadn’t realized how strained her relationship with her husband was until I had pointed out the need for healthy interaction while being together 24/7. After our talk, she sat down with her husband to have a serious conversation about the situation. Together, they decided to stick to their separate routines, have their own spaces apart. Susan would spend time at her home office and her husband and child would spend days accomplishing school work in the living area. They would come together as a family after the workday was done — as they would have before the pandemic — so that they wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves.

Soon after, they also sat down and conversed with their young child regarding COVID-19, remaining calm and simply discussing what they, as a family, needed to do to stay healthy. Due to their reassuring manner, their child expressed more willingness to open up to them about any worries he might have regarding the pandemic.

Conclusion

Towards the end of our coaching sessions, Susan informed me that she had finally established a balanced work-life routine that suits her and protects her relationships with her loved ones.

While the new abnormal ushered in by COVID-19 has brought unprecedented changes to our lives, there’s no reason you can’t survive and thrive in the new abnormal while we wait a few more months for a vaccine. You need to identify, anticipate, and take care of your fundamental needs.

Repetition Makes it True. Repetition Makes It True. Do You Believe me Now?

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more real when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more trustworthy. So anything you hear will feel more accurate each time you hear it again.

Do you see what I did there? Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more trustworthy. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Go back and recall your experience reading the first sentence. It probably felt strange and disconcerting, perhaps with a tone of outrage, as in “I don’t believe things more if they’re repeated!” 

Reading the second sentence did not inspire such a strong reaction. Your reaction to the third sentence was tame by comparison.

Why? Because of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life – including misinformation – revolves around cognitive fluency in one way or another. 

Now think about how rumors spread in your organization’s grapevine. It works on the same principle. Employees hear a rumor – say about a proposed headquarters move, just like Elon Musk’s move of Tesla’s HQ to Texas. It feeds into their fears, which is a very cognitively fluid part of our minds. 

They repeat the rumor, and it goes around, and then they keep hearing it from others. It begins to seem more and more authentic, regardless of reality. Before you know it, those who want to stay where they are looking for another job, even though you might never have intended to move your headquarters! 

Fortunately, we can learn about these mental errors, which helps us address misinformation and make our workplaces more truthful.

The Lazy Brain

Our brains are lazy. The more effort it takes to process information, the more uncomfortable we feel about it, and the more we dislike and distrust it. 

By contrast, the more we like specific data and are comfortable with it, the more we feel that it’s accurate. This intuitive feeling in our gut is what we use to judge what’s true and false. 

Yet no matter how often you heard that you should trust your gut and follow your intuition, that advice is wrong. You should not trust your gut when evaluating information where you don’t have expert-level knowledge, at least when you don’t want to screw up. Structured information gathering and decision-making processes help us avoid the numerous errors we make when we follow our intuition. And even experts can make serious errors when they don’t rely on such decision aids.

These mistakes happen due to mental errors that scholars call “cognitive biases.” The illusory truth effect is one of these mental blindspots; there are over 100 altogether. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health and politics to relationships.

Other Important Cognitive Biases

Besides illusory truth, what are some other cognitive biases you need to beware of to protect your organization from misinformation? If you’ve heard of any cognitive biases, you’ve likely heard of the “confirmation bias.” That refers to our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our prior beliefs, intuitions, feelings, desires, and preferences, as opposed to the facts. 

Again, cognitive fluency deserves blame. It’s much easier to build neural pathways to information that we already possess, especially when we have strong emotions; it’s much more challenging to break well-established neural pathways if we need to change our minds based on new information. Consequently, we instead look for information that’s easy to accept, which fits our prior beliefs. In turn, we ignore and even actively reject information that doesn’t match our beliefs. 

Moreover, the more educated we are, the more likely we are to engage in such active rejection. After all, our smarts give us more ways of arguing against new information that counters our beliefs. That’s why research demonstrates that the more educated you are, the more polarized your beliefs will be around scientific issues that have religious or political value overtones, such as stem cell research, human evolution, and climate change. Where might you and your team be letting your smarts get in the way of the facts?

Our minds like to interpret the world through stories, meaning explanatory narratives that clearly and straightforwardly link cause and effect. Such stories are a balm to our cognitive fluency, as our mind continually looks for patterns that explain the world around us in an easy-to-process manner. That leads to the “narrative fallacy,” where we fall for convincing-sounding narratives regardless of the facts, especially if the story fits our predispositions and our emotions. 

Do you ever wonder why politicians tell so many stories? How about the advertisements you see on TV or video advertisements on websites, which tell rapid visual stories? How about salespeople or fundraisers? Sure, sometimes they cite statistics and scientific reports, but they spend much, much more time telling stories: simple, straightforward, compelling narratives that seem to make sense and tug at our heartstrings. 

Now, here’s something that’s actually true: the world doesn’t make sense. The world is not simple, clear, and compelling. The world is complex, confusing, and contradictory. Beware of simple stories! Look for complex, confusing, and contradictory scientific reports and high-quality statistics: they’re much more likely to contain the truth than the easy-to-process stories.

Fixing Our Brains

Unfortunately, knowledge only weakly protects us from cognitive biases; it’s essential but far from sufficient.

What can we do? You can use decision aid strategies to address cognitive biases to defend your organization from misinformation.

One of the most effective strategies is to help your employees and yourself build up a habit of automatically considering alternative possibilities to any claim you hear, especially claims that feel comfortable. Since our lazy brain’s default setting is to avoid questioning claims, which requires hard thinking, it helps to develop a mental practice of going against this default. Be especially suspicious of repeated claims that make you feel comfortable without any additional evidence, which play on the illusory truth effect and the confirmation bias combined.

Another effective strategy involves cultivating a mental habit of questioning stories in particular. Whenever you hear a story, the brain goes into listening and accepting mode. Remember that it’s very easy to cherry-pick stories to support whatever position the narrator wants to advance. Instead, look for specific hard numbers, statistical evidence, and peer-reviewed research to support claims.

More broadly, you can encourage employees to make a personal commitment to the twelve truth-oriented behaviors of the Pro-Truth Pledge by signing the pledge at ProTruthPledge.org. These behaviors stem from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics research in the field called debiasing, which refers to counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but effective strategies to protect yourself from cognitive biases. Peer-reviewed research has shown that taking the Pro-Truth Pledge effectively changes people’s behavior to be more truthful, both in their statements and in interactions with others.

These quick mental habits will address the most fundamentally flawed aspects of our mind’s tendency to accept misinformation. 

Good News on a COVID-19 Vaccine, But Business Leaders Need to Keep a Balanced Outlook

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

What are you paying attention to during this pandemic? What you’re focusing on can make a big difference to your business, career, and health.

Many people are very excited by the prospect of effective vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. This fantastic news has deservedly lifted the stock market, and many companies are moving to eliminate planned budget and staff cuts. 

Yet too many business leaders and stock investors are showing excessive enthusiasm over the attention to vaccine news. The vaccine rollout to the general public is slated for early Spring of 2021.

They’re not facing the reality of today’s third wave of COVID, which is flooding many hospitals and leaving patients stranded. The urgent requests by governors to stay at home and telecommute to tamp down the pandemic’s danger in early November have turned into renewed shutdowns by late November across the US to decrease the strain on the medical system. As a result, the economic situation will not improve, realistically speaking, until late Spring 2021.

It might seem hard to contemplate that the next few months will be even worse than the last few months, but that’s the reality we’re facing. If you’re not paying attention to the reality of the third wave, then your attention is misdirected, as it is for so many people.

Consider what catches and holds your attention whenever you read or watch the news. Most of us tend to be optimistic and focus on the bright side of life. Sure, we might acknowledge that it’s much wiser to balance optimism and pessimism about the future of the pandemic, given the combination of both good and bad news: good news in the long term of Summer 2021 onward, bad news in the short and medium-term of this Winter and Spring. 

Yet it’s hard for us to pay attention to contradictory ideas. Holding such opposing perspectives in our mind causes cognitive dissonance unless we train ourselves to accept complexity and nuance. Thus, most people prefer to let go of the negative information and focus on the positive, despite the danger to their business, career, and health.

Manufacturing Attention: A Case Study

Let’s consider James, the COO of a mid-size manufacturing company, founded in 2012 and growing quickly, whose senior leadership was determined to push through with its product expansion plans even during the onset of the pandemic. When COVID-19 made the news in December, James and the company’s CEO and CFO dismissed any thoughts that it could turn into anything serious. 

However, as COVID-19 numbers started to climb in the US in early March, James grew concerned and discussed with the other leaders the possibility of postponing their expansion plans. He suggested rerouting their resources towards boosting tech and security to prepare for a possible work from home migration. Then, there was the looming threat of loss of productivity in case of an outbreak and perhaps even a shutdown. 

The company had already been testing some equipment to automate more tasks with good results for the past few months, a technology that many of their competitors had already secured and implemented in the last couple of years. James urged the CEO to greenlight the purchase of this equipment and its wide-scale implementation, instead of waiting another 12 months, as initially planned. Using this equipment, many fewer workers with a more general skill set would be needed to produce the company’s products.

Unfortunately, the CEO was unconvinced and decided to push through with the expansion plans. Of course, you can already imagine what happened next, given the boom in COVID-19 cases and the wave of restrictions that were soon imposed on the country. James’ company, along with many other companies in the manufacturing industry, was heavily disrupted.

James decided to contact me for a consultation in late May after learning about my work through a webinar I conducted about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. When he called me, his company was already embroiled in internal team conflicts, and its operations had already been severely disrupted. Even after the state allowed reopenings for businesses, many employees either refused or were unable to go to work due to quarantines, considerably slowing production. 

Even those who had desk jobs had many difficulties working remotely due to the company’s overall lack of preparation for a work from home setup. The company’s business continuity plan was entirely inadequate for such a significant disruption.  

COVID-19 and the Attentional Bias 

When I met with James and the company’s CEO and CFO over Zoom, I told them that we need to acknowledge that COVID-19 severely disrupted our world and will not disappear anytime soon. Believing otherwise helped drive many companies deep into chaos because business leaders failed to take the right action at the right time.

The refusal to recognize the gravity of the pandemic and even the act of downplaying it stems from a combination of three factors: 

● The nature of the virus itself

● The preexisting beliefs and plans of the business leaders

● The dangerous judgment errors we all tend to make that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists call cognitive biases

The latter mental blindspots stem, in large part, from our evolutionary background. Our gut reactions evolved for the ancestral savanna environment, not the modern world. Yet gurus and business leaders alike overwhelmingly advocate going with our gut and following our intuition in making decisions instead of using effective decision-making processes.

One of these cognitive biases is the attentional bias, which caused James’ colleagues to decide erroneously at the onset, and amidst, this pandemic. 

Attentional bias refers to our tendency to pay attention to information that we find most emotionally engaging and ignore information that we don’t. Given the intense, in-the-moment nature of threats and opportunities in the ancestral savanna, this bias is understandable. Yet, in the modern environment, sometimes information that doesn’t feel emotionally salient is the most important data.

You need to pay attention to and accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal, instead of a temporary emergency. That means fundamentally changing your internal and external business model if you want your organization to survive and thrive during these troubled months.

Steering Back to Efficiency

When I last spoke with James at the end of June 2020, he told me that he, along with the CEO and CFO, decided to meet with all the senior and line managers to assess the most pressing issues in each department and come up with short- and long-term ways to address the pain points.

Next, the CEO held a company-wide virtual town hall meeting to update everyone about what was happening and present how senior management planned to solve its crisis.  

Due to the CEO’s efficient and engaging way of handling the town hall, much pent-up resentment was significantly reduced across the company. This paved the way for better cooperation, which was crucial for the significant steps that James, the CEO, and CFO took — starting with stopping all projects related to the product expansion and shelving it for the next two fiscal years. 

Fortunately, only about 30% of the budget resources had been released for the expansion-related projects when they first consulted me. As a result, the CEO, CFO, and James were able to make a timely and strategic plan on how they can reallocate the remaining 70%, including:

● Purchasing and installing the automation equipment

● Investing in necessary social distancing and hygiene measures at their manufacturing facilities to comply with CDC guidelines

● Boosting tech, security, and funding for home offices for an efficient work from home transition for all employees who could be moved to telecommuting

● Providing professional development for their workers, both in working from home collaboration and communication for those who worked from home and in using the new equipment and CDC guidelines compliance for those who needed to come to work

James told me that he and the leadership team were pleased with the results of the changes they made, especially once the numbers of COVID-19 cases began to increase in mid-June, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to a cycle of reopening and restrictions.

Conclusion

During these disruptive times of the pandemic, it’s essential to keep biases in check and pay attention to critical information. Remember that even if your company had trouble making the best decisions at the onset of the pandemic and fell into cognitive biases, you can still steer it back to the right path.  

Adapting to the New Abnormal: A Pandemic Business Case Study

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

Have you changed your views about COVID-19 months into this pandemic? Or are you still anchored to the same beliefs you had in March?  

For example, many people still believe the false claim spread by many prominent leaders in March that COVID is no worse than the common flu. They protest against public health measures such as wearing masks, despite high-quality peer-reviewed studies showing that masks save lines.

They also ignore new developments, such as the recent urgent requests by governors to stay home and telecommute to tamp down the explosive third wave of COVID. Likewise, they ignore just-published research showing that restaurants, gyms, hotels, and other crowded indoor spaces with prolonged exposure – including workplaces that fit such criteria – significantly increase COVID risk.  

We tend to continue treading the same path based on information we initially received. That’s regardless of strong new evidence that our path leads off a cliff. The name cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists give to this dangerous judgment error is anchoring.

Anchoring is one of the many cognitive biases that lead us to make poor decisions. Recognizing its danger and impact helps us make much better decisions to manage risks wisely and survive and thrive in this pandemic. 

Anchoring in Financial Services: A Case Study   

Let’s consider the case of Lauren, CEO of a 130-people regional financial services company based in Texas that had a lot of difficulty with remote work at the start of the pandemic. 

The company’s leadership team didn’t think they needed to prepare for disruption of more than a week or two. They followed early guidelines from the CDC to prepare for nothing more than a brief interruption due to a short-term outbreak. As a result, the leadership team asked all of its workforce to come back to the office as states reopened, despite news reports of an increase in Texas cases. 

However, because of the company leadership’s perception that COVID-19 isn’t a big deal, neither the leaders nor employees took appropriate precautions when returning to the office. Most did not follow guidelines on social distancing or wear masks. Unfortunately, there was an outbreak of COVID-19 in the office traced to an all-hands meeting. Over two dozen employees caught COVID-19, including three C-suite leaders. 

Several employees, including the COO, ended up in the hospital, and two older employees died. This led to a plunge in productivity, attrition, and low morale within the company, which led to some key employees’ resignations. 

Lauren decided to contact me for a consultation in late April after learning about my work through a webinar I conducted about how business leaders can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic.  

Adapting to the New Abnormal 

When I met with Lauren and the company’s COO and HR head over Zoom, I told them upfront that they have to start acknowledging the disruptions brought about by COVID-19. Continuing as they did will endanger their company’s bottom line and even survival during this pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic, most companies activated their business continuity plans and followed along as the months rolled by.

However, I wouldn’t advise continuing with these emergency measures throughout the pandemic’s minimal two years. 

Companies need to go beyond emergency measures to survive and thrive in the next few years. You need to adapt to the pandemic and accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal. 

This essentially means transforming your internal and external business model if you want your organization to chart a productive and rewarding course during these troubled years.

Doing so will include taking a long, hard look at the elements that drive your business. It will also entail revising or, in some cases, even totally revamping your daily operations and business continuity plan.  

Moving Forward From Anchoring

When I last spoke with Lauren a few months ago, she told me that after serious deliberation, she called for a leadership meeting to reexamine the facts on COVID-19. Fortunately, after being presented with overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was a serious matter and needed to take immediate steps, the executives eventually acknowledged the gravity of the situation. The leadership team then decided to take the following steps:

  1. Lauren held a company-wide virtual town hall to debunk the erroneous information on COVID-19 on which the majority of the company had anchored.
  2. The leadership team rolled out a comprehensive remote work program, where employees were provided with tech and equipment support. Employees can also report to the office, but it was strictly optional. The leadership team ensured that the office had all the necessary visual and physical cues to encourage social distancing. Reminders on wearing masks were placed strategically. 
  3. The marketing team updated its external and internal collateral to include what the company was doing to make its virtual and physical spaces safe for its employees.  
  4. The COO worked with the HR head on numerous retention efforts to prevent more employees from jumping ship. 
  5. The sales team built on the marketing team’s actions. They also reached out to clients who had been previously irked by the company’s slow response to inquiries and complaints. The sales team presented all the changes being made to get the company up to speed operationally and assured clients of better service. 

As a result of these efforts, the company corrected its course and finally got back to a productive path. 

The strict policies on working onsite also minimized health risk, thereby lessening the company’s risk of accountability in case of an outbreak in the office. This was a heavy load off the C-suite’s back. They were finally able to focus on product development and saving client relationships. 

Lauren informed me how relieved she was that they made the changes once the numbers of COVID-19 cases began to increase, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to a cycle of reopening and restrictions. 

Normalcy Bias Lessons From Boeing, and How to Prevent a Disaster

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

When Boeing grounding its 737 Max airplane in 2019, following two deadly crashes that killed 346 people, they lost $5 billion in direct revenue by the summer of that year. The overall loss – ranging from damage to the brand to lost customers – was valued by investors at over $25 billion. In late 2019, new revelations about problems with the 737 Max further increased Boeing’s losses. In late December, Boeing fired its CEO Dennis Muilenburg due to the 737 Max fiasco.

What led to this disaster for Boeing? On the surface, it came from Boeing’s efforts to compete effectively with Airbus’s newer and more fuel-efficient airplane, Airbus 320. To do so, Boeing rushed the 737 Max into production and misled the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to get rapid approval for the 737 Max. In the process, Boeing failed to install safety systems that its engineers pushed for and did not address known software bugs in the 737 Max, glitches that resulted in the eventual crashes.

The New Normal

However, these surface-level issues had a deeper cause. Ironically, the airline industry’s transformation in recent decades to make airplanes much safer and accidents incredibly rare is key to understanding Boeing’s disaster.

Boeing’s leadership suffered from what cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists know as the normalcy bias. This dangerous judgment error causes our brains to assume things will keep going as they have been – normally. As a result, we drastically underestimate both the likelihood of a disaster occurring and the impact if it does.

Boeing’s 737 Max disaster is a classic case of the normalcy bias. The Boeing leadership felt utter confidence in the safety record of the airplanes it produced in the last couple of decades, deservedly so, according to statistics on crashes. It would be impossible to imagine that the 737 Max would be less safe than these other recent-model airplanes from their perspective. They saw the typical FAA certification process as simply another bureaucratic hassle that got in the way of doing business and competing with Airbus instead of ensuring safety. 

Think it’s only big companies? Think again.

The normalcy bias is a big reason for bubbles: in stocks, housing prices, loans, and other areas. It’s as though we’re incapable of remembering the previous bubble, even if it occurred only a few years ago.

Normalcy Bias in a Tech Start-Up

Of course, the normalcy bias hits mid-size and small companies hard as well.

At one of my frequent trainings for small and mid-size company executives, Brodie, a tech entrepreneur, shared the story of a startup he founded with a good friend. They complemented each other well: Brodie had strong technical skills, and his friend brought strong marketing and selling capacity. 

Things went great for the first two and a half years, with a growing client list – until his friend got into a bad motorcycle accident that left him unable to talk. Brodie had to deal not only with the emotional trauma but also with covering his co-founder’s work roles. 

Unfortunately, his co-founder failed to keep good notes. He also did not introduce Brodie to his contacts at the client companies. In turn, Brodie – a strong introvert – struggled with selling. Eventually, the startup burned through its cash and had to close its doors. 

The normalcy bias is one of many dangerous judgment errors, mental blind spots resulting from how our brains are wired. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call them cognitive biases.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors in your professional life, relationships, or other life areas. 

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly, more thorough ones for moderately important choices, and in-depth ones for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

Preventing Normalcy Bias Disasters

In particular, with the normalcy bias, it helps to use the strategy of considering and addressing potential alternative futures that are much more negative than you intuitively feel are likely. That’s the strategy that Brodie and I explored in my coaching with him after the training session, as he felt ready to get back to the startup world.

While Brodie knew he wouldn’t be up to starting a new business himself, he also wanted to avoid the previous problems. So we discussed how he would, from the start, push for creating systems and processes that would enable each co-founder to back up the other in cases of emergencies. Moreover, the co-founders would commit to sharing important contacts from their side of the business with each other, so that relationships could be maintained if the other person was out of commission for a while. 

So what are the broader principles here? 

1) Be much more pessimistic about the possibility and impact of disasters than you intuitively feel or can easily imagine — to overcome the normalcy bias’s challenges. 

2) Use effective strategic planning techniques to scan for potential disasters and address them in advance, as Brodie did with his new business plans. 

3) Of course, you can’t predict everything, so retain some extra capacity in your system – of time, money, and other resources – that you can use to deal with unknown unknowns, also called black swans. 

4) Finally, if you see a hint of a disaster, react much more quickly than you intuitively feel you should — to overcome the gut reaction’s dismissal of the likelihood and impact of disasters.

Mental Health Challenges for Executives: Do You Display These Symptoms?

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

While deeply fulfilling, establishing and growing a business poses grave dangers for your mental health as an entrepreneurial executive.

During the expansion stage, a founder will often face brutally long workweeks, pressure from different sources to manage the startup while raising funding, and the stress of having to make many decisions — all at the same time. It isn’t surprising that many entrepreneur executives find themselves developing mental health challenges if they don’t prevent them. 

Unfortunately, mental health challenges still face serious stigma in entrepreneurial circles and are often not discussed and addressed. Sometimes, these issues are discussed implicitly under the framework of founder burnout or work-life balance. The key is to identify when you are on the verge of burnout and address it immediately.

Case Study: Mental Health Challenges for Entrepreneurial Executives

Mike founded a fast-growing direct-to-consumer startup in the mid-stage of expansion, and valued at just under $7 million when he hired me as a coach. He had already gone through a couple of rounds of fundraising. His Board of Directors consisted mainly of investors from those early rounds; Mike retained about 32% of the equity, and those on the Board had over 57%.

He brought me in because he wanted to figure out what to do next. Mike wanted to shift from the rapid growth stage of burning cash to seizing market share, focusing instead on more gradual growth funded by revenue rather than investment capital to become profitable. His board of directors overwhelmingly wanted him to rapidly keep growing the company.

While either position might have merit, the underlying challenge that Mike experienced was a sense of growing anxiety — even dread — about asking more investors for money. An introvert, he always felt fear in doing this and struggled over asking the early investors who now sat on his board. While there’s extensive advice for entrepreneurs over asking people for money and addressing fears of rejection, such advice generally doesn’t address the clinical anxiety and depression that might develop from repeatedly overcoming your intuitions.

Signs of Mental Health Challenges That Shouldn’t Be Ignored

The stressful period that Mike was going through wasn’t something that should be taken lightly. Often, the kind of pressure he was experiencing posed a severe threat to the mental health and potential for executives and employees’ burnout. It’s not only extensive and multiple studies that bear out this claim, but my own on-the-ground experience as a coach to business leaders.

Mike eventually started going to therapy and taking psychiatric medications. However, while I strongly urged him to reveal his mental health condition to the board, he refused to do so. He expressed high confidence that the board wouldn’t support him. Mike shared with me several instances when he saw other startup founders in different situations hide their mental health challenges from fear of an adverse reaction by board members.

He even told me he thought they might question his competence to continue to lead the company if he revealed his weakness. As someone struggling with anxiety myself, I empathized with his concerns but thought he was taking it too far. His fears fit with his broader pessimism bias, an excessive perception of potential threats common for those with anxiety or depression.

Pessimism bias is one of the many dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these mental blind-spots.

His pessimism did not serve him well. The board continued to pressure him. Despite his wise decision to seek professional help, his anxiety and stress undercut his fundraising capacity. Since we did not yet have a close relationship, Mike had trouble accepting the uncomfortable information that his gut reactions were failing him.

Turning Point: Timing Matters on Mental Health Challenges

Pretty soon, Mike was close to burnout. At that point – when he told me that he considered quitting – I finally convinced him to reveal his condition to the board by asking him what he had to lose by revealing his mental health condition.

Well, guess what? The board expressed a great deal of support. Several of the board members, who had pressured him, revealed that they had done so because of their own anxieties. Namely, they felt fearful of larger competitors who might try to catch up to the startup’s early mover advantage. As veteran investors, they saw such scenarios happen way too often, and that’s why they were pushing for rapid growth fueled by investor capital. 

These board members suffered from pessimism themselves, and took it out on Mike, pushing him to breaking point. A couple of members even revealed their own mental health issues. The board agreed to step back from its fundraising goals, focusing instead on gradual growth.

Nevertheless, the story did not have a happy ending. Badly burned out, Mike couldn’t go on to achieve the gradual goals. He lost his passion for the company and started hating going to work. Eventually, he resigned.

The company launched an extensive search for Mike’s replacement. Unfortunately, this person did not work out very well, as he lacked Mike’s credibility — a characteristic crucial in direct-to-consumer offerings. It didn’t help that many startup employees felt discontented with Mike’s resignation, and blamed the board. Many of them left after Mike resigned, further crippling the startup. 

In the end, without Mike’s drive and guidance, the company floundered. A larger company that wanted to enter the space bought the startup for less than $2.5 million, a fraction of its earlier valuation.

Mental Health Challenges in Hindsight

Part of the blame lies with me. Looking back, I believe I could have done a better job supporting Mike in sharing his mental health challenges with the board. The whole fiasco could have been prevented with a timelier revelation. An earlier strategic shift to gradual growth would have solved the need for some fundraising efforts, thereby letting Mike focus on his passion for satisfying customers and building the brand, instead of forcing him to deal with his most hated task of soliciting investor cash. 

He would have had more mental resources and wouldn’t have burned out. The startup would have continued to do well.

I share this story, for which I acknowledge a degree of blame, in the hope that startup founders will take it to heart and influence key stakeholders to be more aware of, and attentive to, mental health issues. This story also serves as a cautionary tale for startup executives wary of disclosing their mental health struggles to significant investors and board members, for fear of their competence being questioned. Mike is one of many brilliant startup founder executives pushed past their breaking point by such stakeholders, and I hope you will never travel in Mike’s shoes. It should also serve as a warning to major investors and board members to support founders and to take care of mental health as a priority.

The Fight to Address Mental Health Challenges

In an increasingly disrupted and uncertain future, which will only breed more stress and anxiety, we cannot afford to lose such talented entrepreneurial executives by ignoring the dangers that mental health pose. Startup executives and employees need to encourage and model transparency around mental wellness and training to spot and support colleagues in times of trouble while fighting the stigma around mental illness.

How Business Can Beat The Coronavirus: Confront the New Reality

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

As the vast majority of companies rush to reopen, they’re falling into the trap of “getting back to normal.” They’re not realizing we’re heading into a period of restriction once again, due to many states reopening too soon. To survive and thrive in this new abnormal, and avoid the trap of normalcy, leaders need to understand the parallels between what’s going on now, and what happened at the start of the pandemic.

Reality Check in a Tech Company

Consider Tim, the CFO of a 90-person tech start-up based in Texas that provides HR and Payroll software and other business back-end software. Unfortunately, the company’s leadership team, including Tim, believed Elon Musk’s statements when he downplayed the coronavirus in March. 

Since the C-suite thought the pandemic wasn’t a big deal and would blow over soon, they didn’t take the necessary precautions and preparations and ended up in a bad place when the shutdowns occurred. They had to turn to a very basic business continuity plan that did not factor in something as significant as a pandemic. Thinking that things would “normalize” soon, they held off making major decisions, such as moving their operations to a virtual setup.

Tim decided to contact me for a consultation after learning about my work through a recent webinar I conducted for CEOs about how companies can adapt to the changes brought about by the pandemic. When he called me, his company was already embroiled in internal team conflicts and service interruptions, which resulted in several clients having problems with the software and a couple of major clients threatening to cancel. It was evident that the company needed help getting out of the murky waters — and soon. 

Facing This New Abnormal

When I met with Tim as well as the company’s CEO and COO over Zoom (by this time I had already moved my previously hybrid in-person and virtual consultations to all virtual) I told them that there were some essential points they needed to understand for their company to survive in the new COVID-19 reality. 

First and foremost, we won’t get anywhere if we don’t face the facts. We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted our world, and turned it upside down. Regrettably, it will not disappear soon.

However, you might be wondering why Elon Musk – and even some political leaders – downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s not like doing so had personal benefits for these leaders. They wound up humiliated when proven wrong, hurting their credibility. 

Like Tim and the other leaders of these companies, these globally-renowned leaders fell into what cognitive neuroscientists call, the normalcy bias. This dangerous error of judgment refers to the fact that our gut reactions drive us to feel that the future, at least in the short and medium-term, will function in roughly the same way as in the past. As a result, we tend to vastly underestimate both the possibility and impact of a disaster striking us. 

Normalcy bias is one of more than 100 mental blindspots that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists like myself call cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research has shown us how we can effectively deal with such dangerous judgment errors.

For normalcy bias, it’s critical to understand the dangers of falling into it and acknowledge the pain you may cause yourself and the company by doing so. Then, you need to consider the long-term outcomes realistically and plan for a realistic scenario that addresses the likelihood of significant disruption.

It was pretty clear from my first Zoom call with Tim, the CEO and COO of the company, that their leadership team had suffered from normalcy bias. However, it took until the second consultation for them to admit (more than a bit grudgingly) that they had succumbed to this mental blind spot. This refusal to admit to reality had less to do with the veracity of the facts I presented, but rather with their initial unwillingness to let go of their “gut feel.” 

After discussing the above points with them, they admitted that it was time to face what lies ahead. It was time to prepare their company for a much more significant disruption than they had anticipated. We used the “Defend Your Future” technique to help them plan for a variety of potential futures. We decided that while they would hope for the best, they would plan for the worst, a wise strategy for addressing normalcy bias.

No Longer Struggling, But Thriving

When I last spoke with Tim at the end of June 2020, he told me that he had decided to share their findings and the points we discussed during the coaching sessions with the rest of the leadership team. It was an awkward conversation, due to the growing conflicts in the company and mutual recriminations. 

However, after realizing that there wasn’t much sense playing the blame game given the urgency of the situation, the C-suite decided to buckle down and address the problems head-on. After outlining the problems and potential solutions, they eventually got widespread buy-in to do what needed to be done to propel their company to recovery. 

The leadership team swiftly addressed internal conflict — a necessary first step to addressing all the other issues. 

They focused more effort on a long-term transition to virtual. The COO led the effort to minimize their physical footprint, having only a couple of people in the office to take care of necessary paperwork. Tim, the CEO, and the VP of IT made quick, practical changes to the company’s policies and processes so that operations would be in line with their virtual transition. 

After the internal conflicts and systems had been addressed, the leadership team focused on reaching out to clients who were threatening to cancel due to the service interruptions. From these efforts, most of the cancellations were avoided, although two smaller clients did cancel.

Tim told me that he and the leadership team were pleased with the results of the changes. They were especially pleased when they realized how prepared they were when COVID-19 cases began rising again, prompting a pause of the reopening process, that led to shutdowns again.

Conclusion

During these disruptive times, it’s essential to be agile and resilient. Keep in mind that even if your company was not able to make the best decisions at the onset of the pandemic, you can still steer it back to the right path by fighting and protecting against the trap of normalcy bias.  

Here’s How Business Leaders Can Defeat Unconscious Bias

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

How can business leaders defeat unconscious bias? First, you need to know what unconscious bias is.

Unconscious bias (also known as implicit bias) refers to unconscious forms of discrimination and stereotyping based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, age, and so on. It differs from cognitive bias, which is a predictable pattern of mental errors that result in us misperceiving reality and, as a result, deviating away from the most likely way of reaching our goals. 

In other words, from the perspective of what is best for us as individuals, falling for a cognitive bias always harms us by lowering our probability of getting what we want.

Cognitive biases are common across humankind and relate to the particular wiring of our brains. In contrast, unconscious bias relates to perceptions between different groups and is specific for the society in which we live. For example, I bet you don’t care or even think about whether someone is a noble or a commoner, yet that distinction was fundamentally important a few centuries ago across Europe. To take another example — a geographic one, instead of historical — most people in the US don’t have a strong opinion on Sunni vs. Shiite Muslims, yet this distinction is incredibly meaningful in many other parts of the world.

As a frequent speaker and trainer on diversity and inclusion, who tries to address potential unconscious discriminatory behavior, I regularly share in my speeches that black Americans suffer more from police harassment and violence than white people. Often, some participants (usually white) try to defend the police by claiming that black people are more violent and more likely to break the law than whites. Thus, they attribute police harassment to the internal characteristics of black people (implying that it is deserved), and not to the external context of police behavior. 

In reality — as I point out in my response to these folks — research shows that black people are harassed and harmed by police more frequently for the same types of activities. A white person walking past a cop, for example, is statistically much less likely to be stopped and frisked than a black person. In addition, a white person resisting arrest is much less likely to be violently beaten than a black person. In other words, statistics show that the higher rate of harassment and violence against black Americans by police is due to the prejudice of police officers, to a large extent.

However, I am careful to clarify that this discrimination is not necessarily intentional. Sometimes, it is indeed deliberate, with white police officers consciously believing that black Americans deserve more scrutiny than whites. At other times, the discriminatory behavior results from the unconscious, implicit thought processes that a police officer might not consciously endorse. 

Interestingly, research shows that many black police officers have an unconscious prejudice against other black people, perceiving them in a more negative light than white people when evaluating potential suspects. This unconscious bias carried by many — not all — black police officers helps show that such prejudice comes — at least to a significant extent — from an internal culture within a police department, rather than pre-existing racist attitudes prior to joining law enforcement 

Such cultures are perpetuated by internal norms, policies, and training procedures. Any police department wishing to address unconscious bias needs to address internal culture first and foremost, rather than simply attributing racism to individual officers. Instead of saying, “it’s just a few bad apples in a barrel of good,” the key is to recognize that implicit bias is a systemic issue, and that, instead, the structure of the barrel should be fixed.

The crucial thing to highlight is that there is no shame or blame in implicit bias, as it doesn’t stem from a fault in an individual. This no-shame approach decreases the fight, freeze, or flight response among reluctant audiences, helping them instead hear and accept the issue.

By adding these statistics and discussions around implicit bias, the issue generally gets settled. Still, it’s clear that some people don’t immediately internalize these facts. It’s much more comforting for them to feel that police officers are right, and anyone targeted by the police deserve the consequences. As a result, they are highly reluctant to acknowledge that more effort and energy is needed to protect black Americans from police violence.

Here are some steps to fight unconscious bias, that will help in making the “best people decisions.” After all, our gut reactions lead us to make poor judgments when we follow our intuition. 

1) Start by learning about the kind of problems that result from unconscious bias, so that you know what you’re trying to address. 

2) You need to convey to people you want to influence, such as employees (and yourself), that there should be no shame or guilt in acknowledging our instincts. 

3) Next, you need to convey the dangers associated with following intuitions and build up an emotional investment in changing behaviors.

4) Then, you need to communicate the right mental habits that will help them make the best choices. 

Remember, one-time training is insufficient for doing this. It takes a long-term commitment and constant discipline and effort to overcome unconscious bias.

How to Prevent Failure While Working From Home

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential disasters that might occur as a result of this transition.

An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced a few months ago, before the pandemic hit. Pete is a mid-level manager in the software engineering unit of a startup that quickly grew to 400 office-based employees doing Electronic Health Records (EHRs). He was one of the leaders tasked by his company’s senior management team with shifting employees to a work-from-home setup, due to rising rents on their office building.

Specifically, Pete led the team that managed the transition of all 400 employees toward teleworking, as he had previously helped small teams of 3 to 6 people transition to a work-from-home situation in the past. However, the significantly bigger number of people they now had to assist was proving a challenge. So too, was the short amount of time available for this project — only four weeks.

When Pete approached me for advice, I recommended the “Failure-Proofing” strategy; a practical and easy-to-use technique to defend against planning and project disasters.  

Step 1: Imagine that the decision, project, or process failed, and brainstorm reasons for why it failed.

Meet with key stakeholders and discuss your plan. Make sure to provide all the details. Next, ask participants to imagine a future where the plan failed. Doing so empowers everyone, even those who are confident that the plan will succeed, to tap into their creativity and come up with reasons why it failed. 

Each participant should anonymously write out three possible reasons why the plan failed. The reasons should include internal decisions, such as manpower or budget restrictions and external factors, such as new policies set by government agencies. 

Next, the facilitator gathers the statements and discusses the central themes around why the plan failed. The facilitator should highlight reasons that would not usually be raised, had the discussion not been anonymous. If you do this technique yourself, list down separate reasons for the plan’s failure from the perspective of different viewpoints. 

Going back to Pete, he decided to gather a group of six stakeholders — one manager from each of the four departments needing to shift to work-from-home, and one team leader from the two teams that would provide auxiliary support to Pete’s team during the process. He also recruited Ann, a member of the firm’s Advisory Board, to be an independent facilitator.

Ann discussed the current plan, which was to shift all 400 employees to a remote work setup within four weeks. Everything, including business meetings, would be done online after the four-week period. Pete’s team would migrate the employees in batches of 100 employees per week and the records division would be last, giving ample time to convert documents and processes to digital platforms. 

After outlining this plan, everyone submitted their anonymous reasons for failure. Ann read out the responses, which highlighted a key issue: The plan would fail because it wasn’t communicated in a clear and timely manner. Most of the participants raised doubts that management could communicate the idea properly, due to a history of miscommunication within the company. Knowing this fact in advance, prepared everyone to make it a success.

Step 2: Brainstorm ways to fix problems and integrate your ideas into the plan.

Pick several failure scenarios from the exercise above and think of ways to solve them. This should include how to tackle mental blind spots and cognitive biases. Also, present any evidence that indicates that the potential failure is happening, or could happen. For this step, it’s critical to have people with authority in the room. 

The facilitator should write down potential solutions. If you’re going through this step yourself, ask for outside input at this point. 

Circling back to Pete’s discussion group: Mary, an HR manager, took on the task of addressing the communication problem that was identified earlier. She discussed the communication issue around senior management and proposed that they immediately send out a company-wide announcement on the migration to telecommuting and the steps to be taken. 

Then, each senior manager had an in-person meetings with their direct reports in middle management, to get buy-in and ensure that the message passed effectively down the chain of command. In turn, the middle managers met with frontline staff and worked out the next steps for each team.

Step 3: Imagine that the decision, project, or process succeeded spectacularly, brainstorm ways of achieving this outcome, and integrate your ideas into the plan.

We’ve tackled failure, so now, let’s imagine that your plan succeeded superbly! This way, your company can maximize its success. 

Imagine that you are in a future where your plan succeeded beyond your wildest expectations. Ask each participant to anonymously write the possible reasons for the plan’s success. Then, ask the facilitator to focus on the key themes. 

Next, the facilitator gathers everyone’s statements and leads the group in discussing the results. Assess each reason for success and decide which ones need attention. Check for cognitive biases as well. After that, come up with ways of maximizing these reasons for success. 

The facilitator should write down the ideas to maximize the plan’s success. If you’re going through this step yourself, ask for outside input at this point. 

Once again, when Ann read out the statements, there was a key theme: They imagined the plan succeeded because management was responsive to the anxieties and concerns of employees during the transition. To address that, Pete’s team set up a telephone number that staff could text or call, that was always staffed by a member of the group. This gave quick answers to questions from staff.

In short, to prevent work-from-home disasters in this time of transitioning to telework, make sure you imagine failure (and avoid it) and imagine success, too (and maximize it). 

Why Our Brain Causes Us to Be Underprepared for Major Disruptions

Posted on by Dr Gleb Tsipursky

Editors Note: Real Leaders is making its archive of magazines freely available to all visitors to our website as part of our contribution to the Covid-19 pandemic. We believe you’ll emerge stronger and wiser when this crisis passes, and we hope our stories will keep you entertained and inspired while we sit out this challenging time. Sign up here and you’ll be instantly redirected to our archive.

We suffer from many dangerous judgment errors that researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics like myself call them cognitive biases. These mental blindspots result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired. 

Our brain’s primary way of dealing with threats is the fight-or-flight response. An excellent fit for the kind of intense short-term risks we faced as hunter-gatherers, the fight-or-flight response is terrible at defending us from significant disruptions caused by the slow-moving train wrecks we face in the modern environment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. 

More specifically, you need to watch out for three cognitive biases. 

  1. The normalcy bias causes our brains to assume things will keep going as they have been – normally – and evaluate the near-term future based on our short-term experience. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood of a severe disruption occurring and the impact of one if it does happen.
  2. When we make plans, we naturally believe that the future will go according to plan. That wrong-headed mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, results in us not preparing for contingencies and problems, both predictable ones and unknown unknowns.
  3. Last but not least, we suffer from the tendency to prioritize the short term and undercount the importance of medium and long-term outcomes. Known as hyperbolic discounting, this cognitive bias is especially bad for evaluating the potential long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s inherently uncomfortable to prepare for the realistic pessimist scenario. That feeling of discomfort is you going against your gut reactions, which is what research shows is needed for you to defeat these mental blind spots in your business and career. Envision a future where COVID-19 isn’t eradicated, but keeps on going and plan accordingly.

Right now, you need to sit down and revise your strategic plans in a way that accounts for the cognitive biases associated with COVID-19. Do the same revision with major project plans. 

By taking these steps, you’ll protect your business from the way-too-optimistic preparation guidelines of official health organizations and from our deeply inadequate gut reactions in the face of slow-moving train wrecks.