Rich Bello breaks down cognitive biases as mental shortcuts that save energy but often lead us astray, especially in remote work. Our brains evolved to make quick, low-energy decisions, which made us favor negative assumptions. The problem: we still use that ancient wiring even when we have time and information to decide better.
Chapters
The major challenge when it comes to remote work is that there's usually an inherent bias against it, at least from an employee or manager's perspective. To really understand the issue and how to overcome this challenge, we need to dig in a bit as to what a bias is in the first place. A cognitive bias is a programmed thinking pattern generally thought of as irrational, right? An irrational thinking pattern that has an impact on our judgment and therefore on our decisions. Cognitive biases have a direct impact on how we perceive the world. These thinking patterns of beliefs and mindsets are almost always based on information that is incomplete and possibly even erroneous. As such, they often lead us to poor judgment, which means that we will make poor decisions based on those faulty judgments. There are many different documented cognitive biases, but in general, we as humans tend to have a predisposition towards negative biases. Why would the Great Architect program us in this way? Cruel joke? No. As usual, when we look. Usually when we look at our inherent programming, the answer inevitably comes down to survival, right? We're programmed to survive. We're programmed to constantly be on the lookout for dangers to us so that we can stay alive, right? So furthermore, we needed to make decisions quickly in a life or death situation. Finally, it's important for us to conserve energy, for us to use that energy in the most efficient and effective manner to meet the prime directive of staying alive. So if we had this programming or cognitive biases to rely on, we wouldn't have to expend the energy to think about the pros and cons of each individual situation each time. So we group situations into categories. We would think about or act in a certain way each time that situation occurred. Now, these biases may have served us well in the old days when there were lions and tigers and bears all around us, but that's not the case today. At least for most of us. Our programming hasn't kept up with our environment. We now have more time to make decisions utilizing more information. And when we have the luxury of time, we should indeed use it to gather the information that will allow us to make the best situation, considering the circumstances.
