⚒️ Toolbox #8: Unlearning Audits, Building Resilience and Debiasing

🛠️ Welcome to the Weekly Toolbox. Our most practical resources, tools and strategies so you can level up each week in minutes.

1. Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realise How Wrong You Are

The great psychologist Dr Daniel Kahneman (RIP) passed away last week

Author of Thinking Fast & Slow, Nobel Prize winner, father of behavioural economics and decision making science. He was a pioneer of making better decisions. And he wanted us all to be a bit less wrong. Including himself.

This tribute piece is an excellent summation of his later years wisdom.

2. What should you do with your life? | Alex Guzey

Thankfully, this is not another one of those generic top 10 pieces of advice. There is substance to this…rough map of figuring out your life’s direction. Our favourite nugget is to slam your plans, goals and thoughts with reality. A great plan is often great in hindsight. The plan’s success may be much more to do with the pivots, iterations, relentless execution and a dousing of luck.

3. Resilience at Work | BrainTools #43

Resilience at work is a probability function - how do you increase the likelihood that you, your colleagues and your company bounce back after tough times?

In this episode we discuss the cornerstones of workplace resilience and provide 4 tools to build your workplace’s resilience quotient.

• Tool 1: Affect Labelling

• Tool 2: Social Webbing

• Tool 3: Cognitive Reframing

• Tool 4: Breaking Burnout

Listen on Apple or Spotify.

🤔 Brain Riddle

What English word retains the same pronunciation even after you take away four of its five letters?

Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!

☕️ Debiasing with Post-Decision Processing

We’re all biased.

The goal, especially as leaders, is to reduce the impact our biases have on good decision making. To prevent bias skewing decisions.

Based on research from Dr Steve Fleming, this simple BrainTool is a great debiasing hack to improve your decisions.

Implementation

To reduce your bias, each time you make a decision stop and engaging in post-decision neural processing. Ask yourself:

1. What factors may have influenced this decision?

2. Why am I confident in this decision? Why might I not be?

3. What data am I basing my decision on?

Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias that pushes us to overlook factors and downplay others in favour of our intuitions. Which can lead to bias, skewed outcomes.

By questioning your decision-making factors and auditing the data feeding into them, you can help mitigate some of the biases in your thinking.

Some common biases to look out for:

Further Reading & Studies

• Metacognition with Dr Steve Fleming [Podcast]

• Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying post-decision processing [Research]

• Neural mediators of changes of mind about perceptual decisions [Research]

🔎 Unlearning Audits

Whenever we tackle a new project, problem or set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, we tend to ask: what do I need to learn to get there?

The question makes sense. We are here. We want to get there. And there is a learning gap. Our desire to accomplish more, pushes us to learn more.

Sure, but what if the biggest risk wasn’t what we need to learn, but what we need to unlearn. The beliefs, habits, knowledge that no longer serves us in our pursuit for excellence.

Implementation

1. Learn: What are the new knowledge, habits, beliefs or tools that you’ve learned over the last year? Create a doc and speed think all the new learnings you’ve cultivated. Your aim is to zone in on your learning baseline to truly capture what specific changes you’ve implemented over this time horizon.

2. Unlearn: Which of these learnings no longer serve you? Which of these learnings, if you held onto, would negatively impact the chances of you achieving your new goal? This is where more deliberate and intentional thought is required. Anything that gets in the way of future success should be ruthlessly culled.

3. Relearn: What new learning can and should replace the old learning, so much so that if you did, would increase the chances of you moving towards your new focus? This brings into focus the areas you’ll want to substitute old knowledge, habits and beliefs that no longer serve you and your goals.

The age old adage of “strong opinions, loosely held” rings true. We must be intentional in red teaming our biases, updating our software and transforming our own behaviours so we avoid wasting time.

TLDR: Don’t ask what do you need to learn? Ask what you need to unlearn?

Research & Further Reading

• Why the Problem with Learning is Unlearning | HBR