A lot of resistance to change happens because of biases at work. Here are some of them...
It is no secret that the concept of "corporate culture" has gained a lot of importance in the past decade. And with that concept, others such as psychological safety, empathy, difficult conversations and failure.
The eyes of the corporate world are where they should be: the well-being of the human beings that make it up.
Ironically a 2018 survey revealed that: while 92% of CEOs interviewed considered their companies to be empathetic, only 50% of their employees thought this was true.
In many occasions, despite the efforts to improve organizational culture, there are several obstacles in these processes. Something that we have learned first-hand with our Failure Program, our program of courses, workshops and events to renew organizational cultures.
Many of these resistances to change are closely related to biases. On this occasion, we will learn about some of the biases that often interfere with these changes in mentality. But first... What exactly are biases?
Although they may have a negative connotation, biases are mental shortcuts. They allow us to make quick decisions and guide us to more effective actions in specific situations.
Normally, 47% of the activities we do, run on autopilot. And that's okay. We can't decide every day how to prepare our coffee or how to brush our teeth. It would be tiring and probably even dangerous. This is why cognitive biases exist.
We do not have to get rid of them, on the contrary, it is important to rationalize and identify them. This could help to improve our mental structures, to be more critical and objective.
Now that we know that biases are not always bad, we can talk about some that get in the way of getting out of our comfort zone. In our experience, we often encounter them when proposing our failure management, psychological safety and difficult conversations programs to our clients:
1.Loss aversion bias: This bias occurs as a negative reaction to change. When it occurs, people tend to place too much value on the potential for potential losses, rather than focusing on the gains
Commonly, when a major organizational culture change is proposed, potential threats to "order" within the organization are often targeted and exaggerated, including a risk to established processes that are generally obsolete and harmful to the culture.
2. Confirmation bias: This occurs when we tend to listen to and give importance to information that confirms or favors confirms or favors our beliefs and opinions.
We see this, for example, when there are proposals for new processes or alternatives to the philosophy approach. Some people with this bias will look for data to refute these new proposals or point to existing good practices as sufficient to not innovate and seek improvements.
False consensus effect: Within this effect, we believe that more people agree with us than is actually the case.
This can happen when someone exposes in a meeting his or her point of view on how unnecessary it is to renew the organizational culture. Since there is no psychological security in the environment, there is low participation or fear of refutation. Therefore, the matter is closed and it is assumed that everyone agrees.
4.Affinity bias: It occurs when we have a greater affinity to what is known. People, faces, situations or environments that are as similar as possible to ours.
These biases tell us about comfort zones. Situations that make us feel safe and "danger-free" because we are supposedly surrounded by things that are safe for us.
When change presents itself, this bias makes us run away from those new opportunities or new paths that we are not used to.
As we can see, many of these biases provide opportunities for misunderstandings, communication failures and overconfidence when making decisions. This makes us resistant to change, improvements, new processes and makes us more prone to make mistakes.
Although biases usually happen automatically and are natural, with our Failure Program we design a series of courses and workshops to identify and question them. With this we seek to improve the corporate culture of our clients and help them make better decisions. Decisions free of biases and more appropriate to reality.
Schedule a call with us to find out how we can help you do the same.
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Let's transform our perception of failure and use it as a catalyst for growth.
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