Five Ways to Mistake-Proof Your Thinking

People make mistakes all the time, sometimes even without knowing they’re wrong. It may take years to discover the error of your ways. Most recently, popular writer Malcolm Gladwell admitted that he was wrong to promote the “broken windows” theory of policing in his 2000 book, The Tipping Point: “Yeah, it’s just like: 'I was wrong. Here’s how badly I was wrong. Here’s why I was wrong.'" He should, he notes, held his ideas “more loosely.”

Sometimes when you’re wrong, the consequences hardly matter at all. You didn’t think it would rain, but it did, and you forgot your umbrella. In Gladwell’s case, though, there were consequences given how the book took the media and popular imagination by storm. How can mistakes, large and small, be detected in the first place?

It’s So Easy to Be Wrong

According to Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Garrett Lee Cohee and Cora Barnhart, when leaders make decisions, the consequences actually can be wide-ranging. The failure by leaders, they point out, “can lead to devastating results,” such as firing the wrong person, backing a cause that fails, or—like Gladwell—supporting an idea that later is shown to be false.

People make mistakes, Cohee and Barnhart explain, because they fail to acknowledge the inherent limitations in the way that we all think about thinking. Cognitive biases, those nasty distortions in the way events are perceived and understood, lead people to the wrong conclusions without them even knowing that they’re doing so. The only way around this involves a process the authors describe as “mistake-proofing.” People need to build controls into their thinking mechanisms that will keep them from going awry, similar to the way that a microwave oven won’t run when the door is open,

The Five Biggest Mistakes That Can Make Us Wrong

Turning to the cognitive and social cognitive literature, Cohee and Barnhart sort the reasons for faulty judgments into five big buckets. Their article focuses on public decisions with devastating consequences. While a leader may be more likely to be condemned to bad thinking by hubris, or an inability to see oneself as a mere mortal, anyone can make these mistakes, as is attested to by study after study in the psychological literature. Each type of mistake can be a problem in and of itself, but when they multiply, their dangers increase exponentially.

1. Attributional bias

The mistake here is to come up with an explanation (“attribution”) for an outcome that does not fit with the facts. The worst type of attributional bias is the one called “self-serving.” In this case, as the term implies, you look at an event only from the perspective of how it reflects on you. If it’s a success, you take credit. If it’s a failure, well, it’s someone else’s fault. Such “unchecked optimism” can lead to excessive risk-taking and “a detached view of reality.”

2. Ignoring the role of randomness

Sometimes there is no explanation for a favorable outcome. It happens for reasons outside anyone’s control. However, there is a tendency for people to forget about life’s freak coincidences that can lead to good things happening. This is the result of having an overly strong locus of control, where you feel that it is you, not chance or other people, who determines a decision’s fate.

3. Unskilled and unaware of it

This “disconcerting” cognitive bias leads the incompetent to think they’re skilled and the competent to downplay their own abilities. In the case of someone whose ego is puffed up by being a leader, their failure to recognize their incompetence can lead to big mistakes. The problem occurs when people assume that because they’re good at one thing, they’re good at others. Social psychologist June Tangney describes this as a “maladaptive combination of personal hubris and a global sense of identity.”

4. Memory bias and unreliability

There is a vast research tradition demonstrating people’s tendency to sway memory in the direction of false recollections, often seeing themselves in a more favorable light than is warranted. Partly the result of self-serving biases, this mistake causes people, especially leaders, to see themselves as the heroes of every story. As a result, they commit the “planning fallacy,” which is to overestimate success based on misremembering past events. After all, if you were the hero then, why not be the hero now?

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5. Jumping to conclusions we want to conclude

What’s known as “fast thinking” leads people to slide as quickly as they can over details when making decisions, particularly when under pressure. If you’re in a hurry to chart a path forward, you’ll tend to neglect the details here and there which may be precisely the ones leading to your undoing. How many times have you read a set of instructions so completely wrong that you had to start over again? In Step 2 of a set of 10 steps, you realize by Step 7 that you had everything backward. You didn’t bother to consider that Step 3 was unlike any you had encountered before.

Slow thinking is responsible for “doubting and unbelieving,” but it is “sometimes busy and often lazy.” As a result, you default back to what you knew in the past to guide you to the future. But what you “knew,” according to the fallibility of memory, often is wrong.

Mistake-Proofing Your Thinking

All of this is very disheartening, especially if you tend to pride yourself on your ability to think straight. Yet, there are cures for each of these ways to be wrong. Begin by examining the description of each type of mistake and turning it into a prescription for change. In other words, knowing you're likely to make false attributions should make you think twice before you blame the wrong person for something that wasn't their fault.

The overall solution that Cohee and Barnhart land on as a general strategy beyond these steps is to conduct “premortems” any time you have a big decision to make. Fast-forward one year to imagine a failed outcome of a decision and then work your way back from there to figure out what “went” wrong. A second important feature of the premortem is teamwork. Don’t let the decision rest only on your shoulders but consult with others (friends, family members, coworkers) as you let that reverse scenario unfold.

Building on this idea of consulting others, there’s a process known as the “Delphi method,” in which groups of people systematically work their way through possible strategies for solving the same problem. Those friends etc. who you talk to should have different vantage points, and some of them should be pessimists or at least people whose opinions and expertise are different from your own.

Finally, the easiest tool for you to employ in your daily life, whether you're a leader or not, is to take your time. Slow thinking may not always be right, but it at least will round out your decisions in a way that takes details and counterevidence into consideration.

To sum up, take guidance from Gladwell’s mea culpa, “Be less certain about everything.” There’s nothing wrong with being wrong, but at least you can avoid these common traps to lower those odds.