Unconscious Bias and the performance management and development process
This week for our blogpost on bias we are not going to talk about a single bias but, as we have already done on climate change, we will take a cluster of biases, in particular some of those that impact performance management. Innovations in this area have been taking place regularly in recent years, in […]
Holidays, gifts & gender stereotypes
“The only gift is a portion of thyself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson For this week’s bias we chose to remain in the light-heartedness and playfulness of the end-of-year celebrations that have just ended and on a topic that we are passionate about: gender bias and in particular behaviors that risk reinforcing it from childhood. Just before […]
“There’s a crisis, let’s appoint a woman”: dynamics and pitfalls of the Glass Cliff
Suzanne is an executive at a large French company in the energy sector. She is told that she will be leading the digital transformation project, a key cross-cutting project that will involve the whole company over the coming months, a role for which she will report directly to the CEO. The project was led until […]
Sunk cost bias: when persevering beyond a reasonable doubt turns out to be a bad idea
We are reading a book that we are not liking at all. But we paid 20 euros for it, so we decide to finish it, in spite of Pennac and the third of his list of reader’s rights which states “It is not necessary to finish a book”. We are not satisfied with our work, […]
Shiny object bias and organic innovation processes
In collective folklore, the magpie is accused of being attracted to shiny objects, going so far as to steal them. But the magpie is not the only one to be inexorably attracted to shiny objects; human beings also suffer from this fatal attraction. One possible explanation could be sought in the ancestral need to have […]
Why do we collectively look away while our house is burning?
During the last course of each term, with my ESSEC master’s students, after having explored organisations from the point of view of people, analysing the dynamics and functioning of subsystems (groups, cultures, organisational subcultures, etc.) and collectives, we move on to analyse some contextual variables that serve to talk about the ethics of organisational action. […]
Positive Stereotyping: another way of putting people into boxes
It often happens to me, when working on unconscious bias issues with groups, during the dialogues that follow the nudge exercises that are proposed, to hear statements that seem to aim at paying a compliment, at saying something positive about a specific category. Some examples of these statements are “eh but you know, behind every […]
Backfire effect: why debunking does not regenerate our thinking
I’m sure each and every one of you has had occasion to get carried away and enter into a politically motivated discussion. The COVID crisis we have collectively gone through has created many opportunities for polarisation: lockdowns yes or no, vaccines yes or no, chloroquine yes or no etc. The arena in which many of […]
Women’s leadership and second-generation gender bias
The lean in model I was preparing a webinar on the topic of leadership and women. The talk was about a model of leadership more suitable for women, which allows to overcome the so-called “double constraint“, so to get out of the dualism “take care = woman, empathetic, emotional etc, take charge = man, strong, […]
Dragons of Inaction: the diffusion of responsibility in teams and in macrosystems
This week we introduce the “Bias of the Week” column with an interesting article written by Giovanna Prina, Managing Partner of BB7, the company with whom we developed our INSIDIAE bias card game. Giovanna makes us think about how, within the work team, the diffusion of responsibility bias can cause drops in productivity and also […]
