When Biases Bite

“This will be the topic of your next email.” Michael Barravecchio

Those were the last words of my coach as we finished our call yesterday. He was right. I am sure you have heard of cognitive biases before. As Forest Gump might say, there are about a “go-zillion” of them. Reading through the list of them is about like listening to Forest describe all the different ways to prepare shrimp.

One of them has me pegged. Before I learned the official moniker, I would have called it the “This is going to be a slam dunk” bias. In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky first proposed it as the Planning Fallacy Bias. It is basically the tendency to grossly underestimate how long a task will take to complete. It also includes the tendency to underestimate the cost of a task. Yep, got that too.

No one in the house knows where the nozzle to the kitchen sink faucet went. Perhaps, there was an occasion when it was more than potato skins...