Matters of Mind

I was surfing through the web and came across this brilliant collection of the tricks that mind plays based on the cognitive bias that gets built.

As a marketeer, this definitely intrigued my sense. Definitely worth a dekko.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases 

Creative Thinking - Enablers and Disablers

Often at work, we come across situations that need creative solutions. Frequently we face situations where resource constraints lead us to decision paralysis. 

Yesterday, I stumbled upon this excellent article on mind traps.

1. Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts

2. The Status Quo Trap

3. The Sunk Cost Trap: Protecting Earlier Choices

4. The Confirmation Trap: Seeing What You Want to See

5. The Incomplete Information Trap

In my corporate experience I have seen many such instances. The most frequent decision trap that I have come across is about The Sunk Cost Trap. Usually to protect our decisions that may have been taken based on information available at a point in time, which does change significantly in a fast changing world, and yet people drive / support these prior decisions, mostly because they do not revisit their assumptions.

I have seen the Anchoring Trap often happen when the first thoughts are those of the Top Boss. If the Boss makes the initial Kickoff thoughts, the rest of the discussion then just goes into implementation of the idea rather than creative constructive approaches.

On personal front, the Confirmation Trap is probably the most common trap that we come across. We like conformance, we love selective hearing, and staying in the comfort zone comes naturally to us. Thus its only natural human behaviour to align with the Confirmation Trap.

The article made me think !