Unlock Your Winning Strategy with This Simple Shift
Confirmation Bias, and Commitment and Consistency Tendency
Getting to the heart of thoughts and issues. Facilitating my first few SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) workshops when I was first starting out doing strategy (more years ago than I care to count) was truly enlightening—although not in the way you might think.
What surprised me was that every company listed “our service” as a strength. They all believed it was part of their unique selling point (USP), much better than competitors. Even companies known for not having great service really believed this.
Why does this happen? That is less important than what to do about it, but the answer is Confirmation Bias, and Commitment and Consistency Tendency. Both are well-documented psychological tendencies.
Biases at play
The former relates to people naturally seeking information that confirms what they already believe and disregarding anything that doesn’t support that view.
The latter relates to people’s tendency to want to act in ways they have always acted previously, and that we look for evidence to confirm that our past actions have been correct.
People want to believe that they, and by extension, the company they work for, are doing a good job because they spend so much time, effort, and energy on their work.
No one wants to work forty hours a week, with a lot of stress and dealing with issues, for it not to count. So, people find ‘evidence’ that supports that view and ignore everything to the contrary.
The Five Whys
This is why learning to probe statements and thoughts is so important. Both in leadership and in strategy.
One technique you can use for this comes from Lean and is called The Five Whys. Simply ask ‘why’ after each statement and generally around the fifth ‘why’ you get to the root of that thought, statement, or issue.
Let me give you a recent example:
This company, let’s call it Excalibur Inc., is filled with wonderful, logical & hard-working people. A while ago, I was helping them with their strategy. The people, company, and product are all highly skilled and successful. When asked what they do better than their competitors they replied, like all companies do, “Our Service!”
First Why: “What about your service do they value so much?”
Note, you don’t have to use the literal word ‘why’ all the time, you just need to probe the meaning approximately five times. If you’ve attended any of my communication courses or read some of my other posts you might have seen that ‘why’ can be dangerous.
Answer #1: “When they need our help it’s because there is a problem and generally there’s a large cost if it isn’t fixed quickly, so we jump in and help resolve things ASAP,”
Second Why: “What problems do they have that they need urgent help with?”
Answer #2: “Something isn’t working the way it should, and they don’t know why,”
Third Why: “Why don’t things always work the way they should?”
Answer #3: “Normally, they have done something incorrect unintentionally, in a way that causes knock-on impacts later in the process. They don’t know exactly what they have done, or how to fix it,”
Fourth Why: “Why do these mistakes happen? Is it because they don’t have the skills in-house to do it?”
Answer #4: “No, even when they have the necessary skills in-house the system is very complicated to use, and unless they have used it for years, they won’t fully understand the underlying complexity and mistakes will happen,”
Fifth Why: “If the system is so complicated that mistakes are inevitable and even very experienced people will make them, is your service to help fix those mistakes a strength and a unique selling point, when your product is part of the reason the mistakes happened in the first place, because it is inherently complicated?”
Answer #5: “No, it’s not a strength. We should…”
And a very productive discussion ensued from there.
Through probing the answers, it highlighted how an obvious strength might be something quite different, and in the process brought a large amount of new information to the table to be unpacked and evaluated. That could fundamentally change the company’s strategy going forward.
I have seen similar variations of this play out time and again, in every strategy session I have been involved with. The really critical information is almost NEVER on the surface. You have to uncover it.
Closing thoughts
This simple example shows why it is so important to learn to probe everything. Don’t take things at face value. Learn to listen and to ask questions until you get to the heart of things. In strategy and leadership, this is an invaluable skill to develop, but also one that can be applied in all aspects of your life.
The Five Whys are a good mental model to have in mind to help you do this.