Transforming Legacy Organizations

CHAPTER 2WHAT IS THE PURPOSE?

The human brain processes many millions of bits per second, but only a fraction of the signals reach our consciousness.¹ Some of the key filters that sort out signals to the brain are human biases.² From an evolutionary point of view, biases are smart because they act as thumb rules (also called heuristics) and make it faster and easier for us to navigate life (Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were the first to chart a large number of human biases. To dive deeper into this fascinating subject, I recommend a close reading of their work).³ But the problem is that the rules of thumb, that we believe are helpful to us, are very often wrong.

Here are just a few examples of how our brain biases cheat us: we all have an optimism bias, which means that we, as humans, are overoptimistic about our own future and basically think things are going to be better for us in the future than they have been in the past. This is also where the ‘well, that would never happen to me’ mindset lies. Paradoxically, there are actually analyses that show that one of the causes of successful people's good fortune is that they have such an immense optimism bias that they are able to convince others about their future success and that this optimism thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, a survey among professional swimmers found that the swimmers who had a tendency towards self-deception also performed better.⁴ Some believe that overdeveloped optimism biases ...