Mindset Monday - Binary Bias

This is episode 174 of the Empowered Team Podcast.

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Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome to Mindset Monday. We are at another Monday they keep flying through. That's the story of our lives. We just keep going. And today's topic for Mindset Monday is called Binary Bias. Now, you may have heard a few people mention this lately. I just had a an executive director friend of mine who was talking about business the other day and mentioned how some millennial had mentioned binary thinking. And I thought, yeah, we just did a topic on this and it's a great topic to bring you into your week in a way that can give you some extra power. So this is what it is. Our binary thinking tends to split things into only two options. And if you look at today's climate, there are a lot of divisive topics for, for a lot of people, and it's dividing us. So today's Mindset Monday is going to allow us to have a tool in order to potentially bring people together instead of be so divided with this topic of binary bias just in understanding it a little bit more. So here's what it looks like. Binary bias is the basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into just two categories. So instead of something that's got all kinds of angles and options and different layers or complexities, instead our brain likes to split it into just two options. Right or wrong, good or bad, this or that. That's how it tends to go. And when we do this, we see it all over the place when we, when we take a look. So think religion, politics, what food you eat. So even your diet, healthy, unhealthy, gun laws, vaccines, politics, marriage, driving, abortion, climate, you name it. Schooling, you name it. People tend to be very divided on a lot of these topics partially because they have strong opinions about them or they're emotionally charged in some way that's very personal. So we naturally tend to take a stance or a side that we think is right and we feel very strong about that, and then make whatever the other thing is wrong without realizing that there's probably not just one other thing, that there's an entire spectrum or complexity or prism of options within that particular topic. So I was thinking about this in the context of our life pre Covid. Just. Just before COVID happened, my husband and I were looking at moving. And our daughter, our youngest daughter, Maeve, who it would affect the most compared to the older four kids. She didn't want to. She didn't want to move. But in doing so, we realized that the choices were we either stay in the current house and renovate or move to a smaller, updated house. Those were the two choices. Those were one side or the other side. And to my daughter, staying was the good option. The only thing. The other option was bad or wrong or, or not the right one, because she wanted this one. And in going through this, we had a lot of conversations about different things. And there's a lot of things she didn't like about moving. She liked where she lived. She loved her home, she loved her, her room. She wanted to stay, going to the same school. There were so many things. So when we complexified it, then there was so much more to it. And I'm going to explain, expand on that a little bit. Our brain, our brains want simplicity. Our brains go 1, 2, 3, many. Freak out 1, 2, 3. Way too many. Don't want to do that. Consider something like voting stations. One thing our family struggled with, not knowing a candidate, who the candidates in our region are, then not understanding what each of them represented or spoke stood for. Having four to five to choose from. Simplicity eliminates overwhelm. And overwhelm is based in fear. So naturally our brain prefers simplicity. Keep it simple, this or that. So when we go back to my daughter and looking at do we move or don't we move? There were so many other things that were going on that she wasn't aware of. When we had to open up for. For her in her world, the time. What would it take to renovate? The cost of materials? Maybe our neighborhood? What would another neighborhood look like? The housing market, unknowns of renovations. What about finding the right home? Could we even find the right home? The unknown of buying an older home versus a newer home? Or the price of a new home? What to do with all our stuff? How are we going to unload all of our stuff? Having enough room for all of our family to be together? All the kids in A new home if it was so much smaller. What about the school district, the bus route, or staying in the same school versus moving to a different school, French school versus English school? All of it started to come out. Now you can feel with all those options and all that complexity, how that can create some overwhelm, create some fear. But when we intentionally complexify it, we start to look at it from all angles and see that there's not a right or wrong, there's not a good or bad. There are so many different things that can expand our understanding of the entire situation. And that makes a really big difference in being able to connect with someone else who may not think the same way we're thinking. This holds true for work, this holds true for family situations where one person thinks one thing and the other person thinks another thing, and it's coming down to completely just opposing the other person Instead. What we want to do in this binary situation, in this binary thinking or binary bias, we want to complexify. We want to look at all of the possibilities showcasing. And this is what complexifying does. It quite literally showcases the range, showcasing the range of perspectives on any given topic. People are more inclined to think again about their own opinions, especially if we present these topics through the many lenses, a prism, or through different different perspectives going from a higher view. This is something that I read a fair bit about in the book Think Again by Adam Grant, which I absolutely recommend and love. So by complexifying and looking at this whole range or different angles, it disrupts overconfidence, spurs on rethinking. It creates more humility within ourselves and realizing that, hey, I guess I don't know all of the angles of this. I was only thinking about it one way. So it creates that humility within our own knowledge and it creates doubt about our opinions once we start to understand how much more is there. And it also creates curiosity about lacking information, curiosity about what we don't know. So in this scenario of such a polarized or divided environment that we're in, with all the topics that we're dealing with right now, complexifying has an amazing role to be able to connect people that do not think the same someone else thinks. So if you're finding yourself in a situation where it's a teammate, it's a co worker, it's a family member, and you're both creating a lot of tension by having opposing viewpoints. Take a look at complexifying, looking at all the things that are in the range of that topic and bringing it together so that you have that chance of not only exceeding expanding your own knowledge, but also connecting with the other person in a way that might influence them or they might influence you, bringing both of you closer together. So that is the topic for this week on Mindset Monday. I hope that serves you in a way that you can use in your family, use in your workplace, use in areas of your life where you find that it's getting more and more divided, but instead complexify it. Don't simplify it, actually complexify it, and be able to look at the ways that many other people might view things, look at all the other things, or some of the other things that you may not know about it. So have a beautiful week. Normally I'm boiling things down into keeping it simple, but this one is completely, completely opposite in looking at getting it complex so that we can have our best lives, have our best connections, and perform optimally for the areas for the people, for our goals that we want to have in our lives. Have a beautiful week everyone. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team runs year round. 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