On Overcoming Bias

On Overcoming Bias

Clay Banks

A continuous and interesting challenge we are faced with is how to select the best workflow/approach to help users navigate quickly and efficiently. And we say, a challenge, because with an increasing team and more users we sometimes are faced with a dilemma of too many options. Also, interestingly, we see an emergence of bias (mostly either the selection-type bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias or cofirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias). And these two phenomenon albeit not new to any organisation - they have been hardwired in our brains for millions of years - are time consuming and can lead to some frustration or problems in teams. Ultimately, we find ourselves challenged by the need to both overcome or “hack” these things and ultimately, find the best solution in our decision making process.

In our opinion, there are many ways that an organisation could overcome these various forms of bias. At least in our case, we are still continuously looking for solutions but what we found what works - and that is experimentation. We constantly experiment with new types of communication internally to debate and quickly find solutions when deciding and making decisions. Whether these are discussions about design workflows, feature requests and public forms for team-wide access help foster processes and bring to light the best out of teams. They also allow bias to quickly surface and for people to engage in a healthy debate about it.

In the end, what matters most to us at this stage is to keep making decisions very quickly, iteratively and constructively - and helping remove obstacles as they arise. To achieve this, we try and remain objective and really focus on nurturing a bias-free environment through communication - which is super hard but very rewarding. This is a key which we will focus going forward, but certainly experimentation is another friend we will have along for the ride.

That’s all folks ;)