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A Journey of Rediscovery: How Adidas Uses the Past to Innovate

Published date: October 5, 2015 в 4:00 am

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How does a company cope with change? It’s a question that looms large for many executives who are struggling to keep up with the breakneck pace of business. Those who fail to answer it may face loss of market share, or, in extreme cases, financial ruin. All too often, companies respond to these pressures by fixating on the future, not realizing that their greatest strength could be hidden in their past.
In the case of Adidas, founded in 1924 managers, innovators, and designers pore over company history, discuss its relevance, and determine what to discard and what to keep. In a process full of both continuity and change, they reach back to the lessons of the past and stretch forward to adapt to the changing needs of athletes and consumers. The results speak for themselves: Adidas has transformed itself from a consistent loss maker in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a brand with a market cap of US$17.1 billion.
In 1989, with the company at a crossroads, then CEO René Jäggi decided to invite two ex-Nike managers, Peter Moore and Rob Strasser, to visit Adidas. Moore had been creative director of Nike and the designer of the Air Jordan brand, and Strasser had been Nike’s marketing director.
Moore and Strasser believed that over the years since company founder Adi Dassler’s death in 1978, Adidas had lost confidence. Consequently, instead of looking to its own capabilities, the company was foundering and looking over its shoulder at Reebok (a brand that Adidas would acquire in 2005) and Nike. This, Moore and Strasser believed, was a mistake. A brand like Adidas had to lead, not chase. Free of cultural blinders, Moore and Strasser used the marketing skills they had developed at Nike to draw selectively from Adidas’s history. Initially as consultants and then as the creative director and CEO of Adidas America, respectively, they defined a new strategy and approach to innovation that guides the company to this day.
In looking to Adidas’s past, Moore and Strasser recognized two unique capabilities. First, they saw that the core of the company had been Adi Dassler’s hands-on approach to innovation — his philosophy of industrialized craftsmanship. Dassler’s closeness to athletes and his intimate understanding of their needs had created a stream of innovative products that enhanced athletic performance. When the company lost its connection to athletes, quality suffered.
Moore and Strasser recommended renewing Dassler’s approach, and developed a new product line called Adidas Equipment. For Equipment, which was launched in 1991 and later evolved into Adidas Performance, Moore and Strasser created branding rules that emphasized product quality. For example, they placed restrictions on the color, sizing, and placement of the logo, and initially even on the colors of the shoes themselves. They wanted consumers to focus on the quality of the shoe, and not be distracted by other features. They wanted to make the product the hero, just as Dassler would have done. “The idea of Equipment was that it was a model that you could build the whole company around,” Moore told us. “The model was to go back to what Dassler had tried to do all his life, which was to make the best products for the athlete to compete in.” Reconnecting in this way was emotionally uplifting — especially for those who had worked with Dassler — and helped restore employees’ confidence. Today, Performance represents the core of the Adidas brand and accounts for more than 75 percent of its sales.
Second, Moore and Strasser understood that Adi Dassler’s approach to design, which emphasized functionality over style, had created a portfolio of timeless, authentic shoe designs. The shoes were no longer cutting-edge in terms of their athletic performance (the technology had moved on), but they had a strong emotional appeal, especially in the burgeoning street-wear market epitomized by the Adidas-wearing hip-hop group Run DMC and its fans.
Adidas had struggled to create a leisurewear line, but it seemed the company unknowingly already had one. In a brief memo to the Adidas board, Moore set out the idea for a new brand of street-wear shoes. The suggestion was to take some key models from the past and modernize the quality, comfort, and fit. Rather than blurring the clarity of Equipment, Adidas recognized that this new line should have a separate name, “Originals,” and a distinctive presentation. As a testament to the success of the approach, Originals is now a $2.8 billion business. All of the shoes selected for updating at the launch of the initiative are still produced today, including the Stan Smith tennis shoe, 60 million pairs of which have been sold.
Although Adidas looks to its past, it doesn’t live in it. Adidas is not simply a retro brand reworking old models. Rather, it uses its capabilities alongside insights into consumer behavior to create contemporary and innovative products. Embracing its history doesn’t mean being limited by it. It means being innovative in ways that are in line with the capabilities that were developed from the beginning.
It’s an important lesson for companies facing rising competition and uncertainty, and wondering how to distinguish their brand. The answer may be hiding in plain sight. Look beneath the surface to uncover the deeper insights that have driven innovative thinking before, and then think about how to integrate them into the company’s strategies. As Dassler himself once wrote, “Come to work every day as if it were the first time. This will prevent you being blinded by routine.” The past should be a source of inspiration, not constraint. It should be used selectively when it has the potential to add value.
 
See also “The History Behind Adidas’s Success – In Pictures” for a visual look into Adidas’s past.
Adapted and reprinted with permission from “How Adidas Found Its Second Wind” by Nicholas Ind, Oriol Iglesias, and Majken Schultz from the Autumn 2015 issue of strategy+business. © 2015 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. www.strategy-business.com
Author Profiles:

  • Nicholas Ind is an associate professor at Oslo School of Management.
  • Oriol Iglesias is an associate professor at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, and director of the ESADE Brand Institute.
  • Majken Schultz is a professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Innovation Sighting: The Task Unification Technique for Young and Old

Published date: September 28, 2015 в 3:00 am

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The Task Unification Technique is great because it generates novel ideas that tend to be novel and resourceful. It’s one of five techniques in the SIT Innovation Method.
Task Unification is defined as: assigning an additional task to an existing resource. That resource should be in the immediate vicinity of the problem, or what we call The Closed World. In essence, it’s taking something that is already around you and giving an additional job.
Here are two great examples, one about a very young person and the other about a new and nifty device for old people. I love both of them:


To get the most out of the Task Unification technique, you follow five basic steps:
1. List all of the components, both internal and external, that are part of the Closed World of the product, service, or process.
2. Select a component from the list. Assign it an additional task, using one of three methods:

  • Choose an external component and use it to perform a task that the product accomplishes already
  • Choose an internal component and make it do something new or extra
  • Choose an internal component and make it perform the function of an external component, effectively “stealing” the external component’s function

3. Visualize the new (or changed) products or services.
4. What are the potential benefits, markets, and values? Who would want this, and why would they find it valuable? If you are trying to solve a specific problem, how can it help address that particular challenge?
5. If you decide the new product or service is valuable, then ask: Is it feasible? Can you actually create these new products? Perform these new services? Why or why not? Is there any way to refine or adapt the idea to make it viable?
 

Innovation That Shapes Who We Are

Published date: September 21, 2015 в 9:35 am

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When you try on a new piece of clothing, like a shirt or a new jacket, what do you see when you look in the mirror? If you’re like most consumers, you’re not looking at the clothing. Rather, you’re looking at yourself and thinking about how that new clothing fits the image of the person you are or want to become.
As a innovator, you need to understand this very important aspect of consumer behavior called personality. Your customers are complex, and their mental make-up affects everything they do in terms of shopping, buying, and using your products.
Personality is the collection of individual traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Now the study of personality is highly complicated with many different theories and approaches. But for innovators, one personality factor you must understand is known as the self-concept. Self concept is a person’s ideas and feelings about himself or herself. We live our lives shaping and influencing it.
Each of has more than one concept of ourselves. The real image is how people actually see you. Your self image is how you see yourself regardless of how others view you. And your possible self is what you aspire to become one day. It’s like an ideal self image. Possible self also goes the other direction. Sometimes we hold an image in our head of what we want to avoid becoming. For example, we want to avoid becoming a bad parent or friend.
These self images can change depending on where we are and who we’re with. Your self image might be a lot different at home with your family than it is at work, for example.
As a innovator, you can use these self images in several ways. First, you can build products and services that help people enhance one of these images. Research shows people try to influence most how others see them, so people buy products that are impressive to others. An innovation method like SIT, for example, can be used to point you in this direction. The Task Unification Technique in particular can be deployed in a way that forces you to seek benefits related to the consumer’s self image.
Or, you can appeal to how customers see themselves in their own eyes. If they consider themselves very handy around the house, you can offer tools and other products that help them be great at it. If you want to appeal to customers striving to get ahead in life, you can offer self improvement products and services that let people pursue their dreams.
The self concept is also a very useful way to perform market segmentation. Segmentation is grouping people around at least one common characteristic. A particular type of self image could serve as a way to segment and target customers in your marketing plan.
Finally, innovators need to understand their customer’s self image so they can appeal to it in communications such as advertising or product packaging. Let’s go back to our handyman example. If you wanted to reach this target audience, you would show a commercial featuring a handyman at work using your inventions and doing a great job with it. All the handymen out there will identify with the commercial because it’s telling us that your products will reinforce my self concept as a handy person.
People consume products and services to make themselves happy, and a big part of that is feeling happy about who you are. Innovators don’t just create products. They help consumers shape the person inside. And that’s a very special role.
 

Innovative Thinking to Control Healthcare-Associated Infections

Published date: September 14, 2015 в 3:00 am

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On any given day, it’s estimated that 1 in 25 hospital patients in the U.S. has at least one healthcare-associated infection (HAI), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That includes pneumonia; gastrointestinal illness; or infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream or surgical site.
Sadly, despite enormous resources aimed at preventing the problem, HAIs continue to result in infection and even death. Moreover, HAIs cost the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $35 billion annually, making it one of the biggest challenges facing hospital chief executive officers. Clearly, a new way of thinking about HAIs is needed.
Finding new, innovative ways to address a confounding problem like this is difficult, especially if hospitals continue to seek solutions using outdated, “think-outside-the-box” methods like brainstorming. Fifty years of research shows brainstorming doesn’t work. Not only does it actually kill good ideas, but it disproportionately eliminates the very best ones.
Instead, hospitals need to employ more powerful, structured methods of innovating. One proven approach is Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). To use SIT, hospitals must retrain the way they look at the problem.
Most people believe innovation begins by establishing a well-defined problem and then thinking of ways to solve it. SIT works in the opposite way. Innovators use SIT to work backwards to take an abstract, hypothetical solution and find a problem that it can solve.
Psychologist Ronald Finke first reported this in 1992 when he recognized there are two directions of thinking: problem-to-solution and solution-to-problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).
To create hypothetical solutions that can lead to problem-solving, SIT follows a set of given patterns. In fact, for thousands of years, innovators have used these five simple patterns in their inventions, usually without even realizing it.
The five patterns are: subtraction, task unification, division, attribute dependency and multiplication. These patterns are embedded into products and services almost like DNA. They regulate thinking and channel the ideation process in a structured way that makes people even more creative.
As an example, consider how to apply the task unification pattern to HAI prevention. Task unification is defined as assigning an additional job to an existing resource. It’s a useful technique to help break the natural tendency toward functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that prevents us from seeing opportunities outside what’s expected.
To use task unification, make a list of components and resources within a hospital. The component
list would include things like:

• Board of trustees
• Hospital management team
• Doctors
• Nurses
• Technologists
• Radiology department
• Laboratory
• Rehabilitation
• Pharmacy
• Admissions
• Discharge
• Patient records
• Finance
• Marketing
• HR
• IT
• OR
• Patient rooms
• Nursing stations

Each component or resource should then be given the additional job of how it could break the chain
of infection associated with HAIs.
For example, imagine the admissions department has the additional job of eliminating infections through the portal of entry via the patient’s eyes. It sounds crazy at first, but at this stage, the job is to simply ask, what would the benefit be? Could the admissions team identify patients who might be more susceptible to eye infections? Could they administer eye drops at the time of admission to reduce infections? Could they give patients eye protectors or instructions on how to avoid eye
infections?
Given the admissions department is the first stop of a hospital visit, this idea might have value.
Creating hypothetical solutions may result in a seemingly ridiculous combination of possibilities. But don’t be dissuaded! SIT is intended to reveal a steady stream of plausible ideas.
Now try using the subtraction pattern. Subtraction is defined as removing an essential component and replacing it with something else.
Like before, make a list of components of some aspect of HAI management, then systematically subtract one at a time to see the possibilities for unique and innovative replacements.
For this exercise, apply subtraction to ICU information monitoring. The components of this activity
include:

• Gathering infection data
• Recording data
• Analyzing data
• Reporting data
• Tracking patient locations
• Assessing impact of staff activity on infection outcomes
• Monitoring antibiotic resistance
• Monitoring antibiotic prescribing patterns

Select one of these components randomly from the list and consider the possibilities if that component were removed and replaced with something else. For example, imagine removing monitoring antibiotic prescribing patterns.
It may seem absurd at first. But what if another component of the hospital, such as the pharmacy or finance department, was responsible for this activity? Would that department be able to analyze it from an inventory or cost approach that added value to the overall program? What if drug companies monitored this for their antibiotic products as a value-added service? Would this reveal better practices and uses of their products?
Management and control of HAIs is an intensive, widespread activity for healthcare systems. By narrowing the scope of these activities and applying systematic creativity techniques to each one, hospitals can discover new, never-before-considered ideas to address this pervasive challenge.
 
(This article first appeared in Managed Healthcare Executive, September 1, 2015)

Thinking Creatively: How Deadlines Encourage Inside-the-Box Ideas

Published date: September 8, 2015 в 9:57 am

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Taylor Mallory Holland at Content Standard wrote this insightful article how tight deadlines can have both a positive and a negative affect on creativity.
From her article:

Dr. Richard Boyatzis, a professor of organizational behavior, psychology and cognitive science, explained his team’s findings to The Wall Street Journal:
The research shows us that the more stressful a deadline is, the less open you are to other ways of approaching the problem. The very moments when in organizations we want people to think outside the box, they can’t even see the box.

Taylor offers the following advice on how find the right balance:

Ditching deadlines isn’t the answer, nor is sacrificing quality for the sake of speed. But how do we find a happy medium?
For leaders in creative fields, the lesson here is to set flexible deadlines whenever possible—to leave some wiggle room in case good ideas take longer than planned. Consider breaking large projects into smaller tasks with their own deadlines. This not only prevents last-minute stress and overwhelm for workers; it also gives you good opportunities to check in and to offer support and feedback.
As Laura Vanderkam points out in her Fast Company article, it also helps to know your team members and set expectations for individuals. She says that while some people are good at meeting deadlines, “Others need more hand-holding and frequent check-ins. They’re not bad people, they’re just different people. Good management means getting to know the people you’re working with, and using deadlines as one tool in your kit for getting good work out of them in a timely fashion.”
While an understanding and flexible boss is certainly an asset for creative workers, individuals must also take responsibility for getting the job done—for thinking as creatively and as quickly as possible. This requires commitment and proper planning so we can give ourselves the time we need, rather than rushing at the last minute and stressing ourselves to the point of writer’s block. It also means learning how to get in the “creative thinking” zone when we need to be productive, not just when the moment strikes.
For scientifically-proven ways to be innovative and efficient, read “7 Productivity Tips to Boost Creativity on a Deadline.”
 
 

Innovators: Beware the Hindsight Bias

Published date: August 31, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Imagine you’re testing a new innovation to see if it can work for your business. You’ve been told by experts that there’s only a 20% chance that it’ll work in your situation. But, something inside tells you it might work. You say, hey, it’s worth a try. Let’s go ahead.
Sure enough, it works! You’re thrilled, and you so say “I knew it all along!” This is good news, and you know that your boss is going to love it, too. So you rush in and sell the idea to the boss and the rest of the team.
Everyone’s excited about the roll out of the new concept. You’ve spent a lot of time and money, and today is the big day. Then, the unthinkable happens. It doesn’t work. How could that be. You try it again, no good. You keep trying it over and over. It works a few times, but for the most part, nothing.
When you look back at all your attempts to use the concept, you realize that it worked…only 20% of the time, exactly what the experts told you.
So what happened here? You were guilty of a bias that we all have called The Hindsight Bias. Hindsight bias, also known as the “knew-it-all-along effect”, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Hindsight bias causes you to view events as more predictable than they really are. After an event, people often believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened.
Hindsight bias can cause memory distortion. Because the event happened like you thought it would, you go back and revise your memory of what you were thinking right before the event. You re-write history, so to speak, and revise the probability in hindsight. Going forward, you use that new, higher probability to make future decisions. When in fact, the probabilities haven’t changed at all. That leads to poor judgement.
Hindsight bias can make you overconfident. Because you think you predicted past events, you’re inclined to think you can see future events coming. You bet too much on the outcome being higher and you make decisions, often poor ones, based on this faulty level of confidence.
To avoid hindsight bias, keep these pointers in mind:

  • First, the future is not predictable. When you start to think you can predict it, remember, everyone else thinks they can too. Someone is always wrong.
  • Make decisions based on what the data says is likely to happen, not based on what you think is going to happen.
  • If you make a prediction, and that prediction comes true, don’t revise the odds because of the outcome. The probabilities haven’t changed.
  • Finally, always lay out a plan of action before you start any initiative. Include in that plan any data or expert advice about possible outcomes for the initiative. That’ll help keep you honest at those times when you think you have a magic crystal ball.

What Consumers Must Learn to Adopt New Innovations

Published date: August 24, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Think about the last time you bought a car or perhaps a computer. Now, think about the next time you’ll buy one of those items. Are you going to do it exactly the same way as before? If you’re like most consumers, the answer is probably not. That’s because you learned some things from the first experience that will improve your purchasing behavior on the next experience. That’s especially true with new, innovative products.
As a marketer, you need to understand how people learn about being a consumer and what they do with that knowledge once they learn it. Marketers can play a key role in helping consumers be better at it. After all, we’re not born to be consumers. Consumer behavior is something we have to learn if we ever want to buy products and services.
Let’s look at what consumers have to learn. First, they need to have at least general product knowledge before they’ll buy it. Think about buying a car. Most people have no idea how a car’s engine works, but they certainly know how to drive a car, what kinds of features they might expect, and how a car handles on the road. Over time, they gain more knowledge about cars and how they work, how to maintain them, and so on.
Consumers also need to have brand knowledge. The starting point for learning about brands is basic awareness. That means that you’ve heard of it and may recognize its logo, but you don’t know much about it. But over time, as you learn more about it, you begin to associate certain characteristics with it. Eventually, you know a lot about the brand and its core brand promise. Try this. Write down on a piece of paper all the brands of automobiles that you can recall. Now, beside each brand, write down what it stands for and write at least one characteristic about it. You should see pretty quickly that your knowledge of brands varies quite a bit. That’s typical of most consumers.
Next, consumers have to have purchasing knowledge. That means they have to know how to buy the product, where to buy, and what it’ll cost in terms of the pricing and other factors like financing. It may seem obvious, but the first time you buy something, you have to learn these factors. If I told you to go out and buy a piece of medical equipment for treating gall bladders, you’d have to do a lot of research unless you’re a medical professional now.
Once a consumer buys something, they have to have consumption knowledge. That means they have to learn how to use a product to get the full benefits from it. It also might include learning how to maintain the product or even dispose of it. Think about buying a new car. If you’re like me, it takes quite a while to learn all about the new features and benefits of today’s cars. With an owner’s manual this thick, I still don’t use many features of my new car. For marketers, this is important because it may lead the consumer to think they’re not getting their money’s worth if they’re not using a product to its fullest potential. You want your customers to be satisfied, so you have to make sure they learn the right way to consume your product.
Finally, consumers need to have self-knowledge. It may sound obvious, but the more a person knows about their personal tastes, their preferences, and their strengths and weakness, the more effective they’ll be at buying products and services that satisfy their needs.
As a marketer, you’re really an educator. And your students? Those are your customers. The more you can help them learn these factors, the more successful you’ll be at satisfying them.
 
 
 

Innovation Sighting: Adjustable Airline Seats

Published date: August 17, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Here’s a nice example of the Attribute Dependency Technique, one of five in the innovation method called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). It’s a great tool to make products and services that are “smart.” They adjust and learn, then adapt their performance to suit the needs of the user. Attribute Dependency accounts for the majority of innovative products and services, according to research conducted by my co-author, Dr. Jacob Goldenberg.
From Fox News:

The airline legroom wars may finally be coming to an end.
Engineering firm B/E Aerospace has filed a patent for a “legroom adjustable” seat design that allows flight attendants to move a seat forward or back depending on the size of a passenger, reports the Telegraph.
The seats, which all have moveable wheels, sit on rail tracks lining the aircraft floor. If a taller man or woman is seated in front of a child, for example, the cabin crew will have the ability to move an occupant’s seat several inches back via smartphone or tablet, allowing for extra legroom.
“While passengers come in many sizes, children, adolescents, adults, men, women and with large height differentials within these categories, seat spacing in the main cabin of passenger aircraft is generally uniform except at exit rows,” the designers stated in their patent application, submitted in November.
“The one size fits all seating arrangement can cause discomfort for tall passengers, while a child or relatively small adult may be seated in an identical seat at the seat pitch, with more than ample leg room and in relative comfort.”
The legroom adjustable seat, however, leaves the final spatial arrangement to the discretion of crewmembers, not individual passengers.
“Even a relatively small incremental increase in seat spacing for the tall passengers can provide additional comfort with no loss of comfort to the much smaller passengers seated in front of the tall passengers,” B/E Aerospace said.

To get the most out of the Attribute Dependency Technique, follow these steps:
1. List internal/external variables.
2. Pair variables (using a 2 x 2 matrix)

  • Internal/internal
  • Internal/external

3. Create (or break) a dependency between the variables.
4. Visualize the resulting virtual product.
5. Identify potential user needs.
6. Modify the product to improve it.

Master the Method: Innovation Suite #18

Published date: August 11, 2015 в 3:13 am

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I invite you to join the upcoming Innovation Suite  in San Francisco, November 16-18, 2015.
Innovation Suite brings together executives from around the world to share their business innovation experiences and to learn how to embed a culture of innovation within their teams and organizations.
This time around, the event will have two specialized tracks: one for Innovation Users, and another for Innovation Architects. In the Innovation User track, participants will learn how to develop an innovative mindset and learn practical tools for approaching routine work differently.
In the Innovation Architect track, participants will learn how to set up the right structure, gather the right people, and develop the right processes and mechanisms in order to embed innovation in their team, department or whole organization.
Register before August 20 to receive a 10% discount Please contact SIT LLC with any questions.
 

Beware the Overconfident Innovator

Published date: August 3, 2015 в 3:00 am

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I want you to imagine that you’ve been working on a string of projects, and they’ve all gone very well. You’re talented, hardworking, and ambitious, and you’re on a roll.
Then, your next assignment comes along. It’s a big challenge like the ones before. You’ve got a tight deadline, a limited budget, and lots of pressure to make it a big success. Then, something bad happens. You were faced with a critical decision. You knew ahead of time that you didn’t have all the information, but you made a decision anyway…and it was dead wrong.
So what happened? Well, you may have been guilty of a cognitive bias called overconfidence.
Overconfidence is the unwarranted faith in one’s intuitive reasoning. We think we are much better at making decisions that we really are. Research has shown that we overestimate our predictive abilities and we overestimate the precision of information that we have about a situation. We’re poorly calibrated in estimating probabilities – we tend to believe something is much more likely to occur than it really is. That’s overconfidence.
Overconfidence happens for different reasons. One is that we oversimplify things. Situations that you face at work are usually much more complex than you realize. If did realize it, you’d be less likely to be so confident about a decision. Another reason is that we don’t account for the role that chance plays in our decisions. Every decision involves some degree of variability. We falsely assume that luck will always be on our side especially after a string of successes. We take excessive risks, and we roll the dice one more time.
Another big source of overconfidence is expertise. If we’re an expert in a particular field, that sense of expertise trickles into other areas of lives. In short, we think that we’re smarter and have better information than we actually do.
Overconfidence is a real problem. When you are too sure that you’ve got it right, you don’t try to improve your understanding of a situation. You don’t check your facts, or get more information. You may not prepare properly for a situation, and that could get you into a sticky situation that you’re is not equipped to handle.
For example, a person might think his sense of direction is much better than it actually is. He goes on a long trip without a map and refuses to ask for directions if he gets lost along the way. He’s suffering from the overconfidence bias.
It can affect you at work. You may think you’re invaluable to your company when in fact almost anyone could do your job. That could affect your work behavior and your attitude with co-workers. Overconfidence might cause you to cut corners or think you’re untouchable and not governed by rules and regulations. That could lead to real trouble.
To avoid the overconfidence bias, keep these pointers in mind:

  • Past success is no guarantee of future success. Treat each new decision as if it were your very first. Just because you had a string of correct decisions has no bearing on the one you face right now.
  • Expertise is no guarantee of future success. As the nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, said, “Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. They will have to struggle to remind themselves that they may be in the grip of an illusion.”
  • Recheck your facts about a situation. Ask, why are we doing this in the first place? Suspend your initial judgment about a situation and check the validity of your assumptions.
  • Slow down! Look at multiple perspectives and think through the implications and consequences of a belief or an action.
  • Be confident, but not overconfident. The odds are not as good as you think they are, so roll back your sense of certainty.
  • We all have talent and experience, but we can improve our judgment a lot by having a more realistic sense of our cognitive abilities.

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