I’ll See Your Introspection And Raise You A Cognitive Bias

Several weeks ago, arts marketer Ruth Hartt posted a thought-provoking post at LinkedIn designed to get arts managers thinking about how they measure relevance.

It’s an excellent perspective and you can never really have too many reminders about getting outside of your bubble. My only additional thought is the stakeholders who would benefit from this introspection are most likely to miss it. Nutshell: cognitive bias will erase any gains from deliberate introspection.

As a result, I offer up a small addendum:

1. Acknowledge that cognitive bias exists, and no one is immune.
2. Know thyself: while there are numerous types of cognitive bias, most professionals fall victim to the same few.
3. Identify a small group of colleagues* outside your comfort zone to function as your sanity check squad.

While you don’t need to run a full-blown cognitive bias check for each and every task, it’s worth leaning on those points from time to time to help stay in our relevance lane.

*If no one comes to mind, you have a much bigger problem to address.