We hear a lot about unconscious bias, largely in the context of people’s attitudes to people from minorities. For clarity, “unconscious bias refers to a bias that we are unaware of, and which happens outside of our control. It is a bias that happens automatically and is triggered by our brain making quick judgments and assessments of people and situations, influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences”. For me, the key word above is ‘automatically’, and the key phrase is ‘influenced by our background, cultural environment and personal experiences’. Unconscious bias can, of course, be positive and negative. Conscious bias should need no explanation.
So, what role does unconscious bias play in key business decisions? I would argue that it is huge. Here’s an example. When evaluating business proposals, organisations go to great lengths to ensure that these key business decisions are objective and transparent. This can be achieved by involving a broad evaluation team, or restricting access to certain pieces of information (often price, occasionally even the potential suppliers name), and providing the evaluators with objective scoring metrics. Let’s look at that last element; scoring metrics. You’re evaluating a written response to a question, probably written by someone you’ve never met. Having read their answer, you have to consciously score their response on a scale of 1 to 5, or similar. Unconsciously (the key word), you love / hate the way It is written (critically, it could have been written by someone whose mother tongue is not the one they are writing their answer in). You may also like / dislike their organisation, based on previous experiences, good, bad or indifferent. These unconscious factors influence your conscious decision. You might pick a score immediately, or you might waver (is it a 3 or a 4?), but ultimately (and quickly), you have to pick a number.
Does your choice make a difference, after all, it’s just one score? Yes, it does make a difference, because the same logic applies to every question you evaluate, and to everyone doing the evaluating. If every conscious decision to award a 3 instead of a 4, or vice versa, based on unconscious bias, is added up, or deducted, the impact on the final score will be significant, and undoubtedly influence the final business decision, which is often very close.
Can we do anything about it? Probably not, but we can consciously try to ensure that every interaction with a potential customer is a positive one, which should hopefully go some way towards influencing / shaping their unconscious view of us. Food for thought I hope? Do you agree, or disagree, or just think I crazy?