One of the four fogs.
Mood, fatigue, the residue of yesterday’s meeting, the anxiety about next quarter: these are not peripheral to how a situation is perceived. They are the lens being looked through at that moment.
The literature on cognitive bias has documented specific distortions thoroughly. What it has documented less clearly is the persistence of the condition. We are not occasionally distorted. We are always perceiving through a particular state, and that state is largely invisible to us while we are in it.
This has practical consequences for organisations. A leadership team that meets to make a strategic decision is not a neutral deliberative body that happens to contain human beings. It is a collection of people who each bring a particular state, a set of pressures, a history of relationships with the others in the room, and a set of assumptions about what is discussable. The decision that emerges is shaped by all of this, in ways that are real and largely unexamined.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is simply the accurate description of the conditions. The response is not to pretend the distortion isn’t there, or to try to engineer it away with better process. It is to have someone in the room — or in the conversation — whose job is to notice the distortion and name it. To see what the group cannot see about itself.
Related
- The four fogs
- External opacity
- The suppression of finitude
- Aperture — what it means to have someone read the frame from outside it