Stephen Shapiro (Innovation Minute Ep. 24) explains that confirmation bias causes people to run biased experiments that seek to confirm their preconceived beliefs, which undermines innovation. He highlights that teams can rationalize failures (quoting Scott Cook: "spreadsheets that looked awesome") and previews that the next episode will offer techniques to overcome confirmation bias and run better experiments.
Chapters
Today I am going to talk about why the brain is designed to cause you to run faulty experiments which will ultimately lead to your failure. In the world of innovation, we seem to think that yeah, but is the enemy of innovation. But guess what? It's not. We need disproving evidence. We need people to prove why maybe our ideas are bad. The real enemy of innovation is the wow, this is a great idea. Because here's what happens when you believe you have a great idea. The brain kicks in. It's called confirmation bias. What ends up happening is the brain finds all the reasons why your idea is a great idea and all of the evidence that proves it's a bad idea gets rejected. This is what confirmation bias is all about. And so what we need to do is recognize that the brain is not designed to be our friend when it comes to our experiments. When we have a strong belief that this is a great idea, we will run experiments that are going to prove that it is, when in fact, it might not be leading to failure. One of my favorite quotes when it comes to innovation is from Scott Cook at Intuit. He said for each of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome. I absolutely love that quote and it is the reason why failures actually happen. We can justify anything. We can create spreadsheets to justify our beliefs. But if our beliefs are built on faulty assumptions, it not going to be successful. Confirmation bias is the reason why we tend to run very poor experiments, because we want to believe what our ideas are and that they're great. In the next episode, I'm going to talk about some specific techniques you can use to overcome confirmation bias to help you run better experiments.
