Four strategic cognitive biases

What prevents us from being good strategists

What prevents us from being good strategists

Businesspeople love to think that they can think clearly and rationally. But they are also humans; nothing human isn’t alien to them.

First of all, the future is scary (read more here). Therefore, people would rather believe in a gloomy future scenario in which humankind is enslaved by AI than in an optimistic one. This cognitive bias comes from our natural fear of uncertainty, and it influences our ability to see more opportunities than threats.

The second bias, somehow connected with the first one, makes us believe that the world of tomorrow will be pretty much the same as we see around now. If someone insists that changes are inevitable, we try to convince ourselves that they will happen elsewhere — in a different industry or country. I have conducted many strategic workshops for organizations from different domains. And I often heard from the participants who had recently telephoned to call a taxi and bought paper flight tickets that their…