Is Your Thinking Style Holding You Back?

Is your thinking style holding you back? Could it be making you less than strategic? We answer this question in the latest weekly video series.
I discussed this topic in more detail in my podcast titled flawed thinking methods that hold you back. You can listen to it here.

Transcript

The transcript of the video is as follows:

Hi I am Ankush Chopra.  Did you know that when we ask a group of people to rate themselves on there driving capability as below average, above average and averaged, 80% of people rate themselves as above average.

You know that is mathematically impossible.  It is just one example of how flawed our thinking styles are. Lets understand how your natural thinking style may be holding you back.

Thinking Like Hunter Gatherers

Do you know that we still think like hunter gatherer although we have evolved since then. As a hunter, your survival depended on your ability to quickly see a potential shape or color and take quick decision.

If you saw a silver stripes in the periphery of your eyes you needed to run. So we became great at pattern matching. If there were people who waited to calculate the probably of that stripe to be a tiger would have been eaten up. So all those who were good at pattern matching survived. And we as a species became great pattern matchers.

An Example of Flawed Thinking

Take this question for example: A is an introverted and shy person who is mathematically inclined and loves solving puzzles. A was  was selected form a group of 70 lawyers and 30 engineers.

Do you think A person is

A. An engineer

B. A Lawyer

Most people select engineer as the answer. They match the pattern of a stereotype of an engineer and choose the answer. In doing so they override the most critical data point in this question. The probability of this person to be a lawyer is 70% but people ignore this. Why do they ignore the critical data? Because the pattern matching takes over.

This is an example of our flawed thinking methods that we naturally use. Science has discovered dozens of these flaws. These flawed thinking styles make us susceptible to big decision errors. For managers making decision on hundreds of millions of dollars, this thinking style can lead to massive losses.

For everyone else, it can hold you back form succeeding at a larger scale.

Link to The Podcast For More Details

Learn many examples of decision errors and more about theses flawed thinking styles in my podcast linked. It is titled Flawed Thinking methods that hold you back.

The podcast episode is: flawed thinking methods that hold you bac