Thinking Fast, Acting Together

(How Kahneman, Oracle and Dutchman Can Help Your Team Thrive)

Leadership should always be looking for ways to optimize our organizational culture for peak performance and teamwork and to improve leadership. Recently, I’ve again been delving into the works of the late Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” and the findings from the Oracle study on executive decision-making, all this related to team building and group decision-making in a powerful team building simulation. Here’s how these seemingly disparate resources can provide valuable insights to cultivate a culture of excellence within our organization.

Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”: Unveiling the Biases in Our Brains

Kahneman’s groundbreaking book explores the two systems that govern our thinking:

• System 1: Fast, intuitive, and emotional. This is our “gut feeling” system, prone to biases and heuristics (mental shortcuts).
• System 2: Slower, more deliberate, and logical. This is the system we employ for complex problem-solving and critical thinking.

The Problem: “System 1 Thinking Quickly Grabs the Wheel.”

The challenge lies in the reality that System 1 generally acts first, quickly accessing our cognitive biases that can cloud our judgment. This impulsive process makes mistakes and carries assumptions.

Two examples of Kahneman’s delineating questions:

Here’s how just a few of these biases highlighted by Kahneman can impact decision-making within our teams:

• Confirmation Bias: We tend to favor information that confirms our existing beliefs, potentially leading to overlooking crucial data or alternative perspectives.
• Anchoring Bias: We rely too heavily on the FIRST piece of information presented, hindering our ability to evaluate additional options objectively.
• Overconfidence Bias: We very often overestimate our own knowledge and abilities, potentially leading to poor decisions or a lack of openness to new ideas.

The Oracle Study: Data-Driven Decisions for Better Outcomes

The Oracle study on executive decision-making sheds light on how these biases play out in real-world settings. The study found that:

• Executives often rely on intuition over data. This aligns with Kahneman’s notion of System 1 dominance in decision-making.
• Confirmation bias is prevalent. Executives tend to seek out information that reinforces their existing views, potentially leading to missed opportunities or flawed strategies. Many other biases influence individual thinking and decision-making every day.
• Data overload can be paralyzing. With so much information and data at their disposal, executives often struggle to analyze it effectively, leading to decision fatigue and inaction.

Bridging the Gap: Leveraging Kahneman and Oracle for a High-Performing Team Building Impact

By understanding the limitations of our thinking and the pitfalls of biases, we can create a culture that fosters better decision-making and teamwork. We can improve the learning process and also help generate a better culture of decision-making through the use of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.

The design of Dutchman is that teams are given “limited but sufficient resources” to plan and implement a journey into The Superstition Mountain in search of the famous Lost Dutchmsn’s Gold Mine. They get a brief overview of the challenge and then learn about the available resources and the consumption patterns during play. The Goal is to mine as much Gold as We can and to mazimize the return on investment. The role of The Expedition Leader is, “to help teams be successful.”

They make decisions about how they can win, what resource cards are required and how the Expedition Leader will support them. They make assumptions about the value of The Videos, extra information available to them and about how they might interact with other teams. They make LOTS of decisions around the play during their 15 minutes of planning time at their tabletops.

SOME of their decisions are good ones and all teams are successful in their journey. But a few teams, making better assumptions, actually do make better decisions to enable them to Mine More Gold than the others. Their play is what generates a highly impactful debriefing session about how their play back at work would generate better organizational results.

The Lost Dutchman game is an excuse to do a powerful and impactful debriefing!

Here is how the debriefing can impact future decision-making:

• Encourage a Culture of Questioning through the debriefing: Normalize healthy skepticism and encourage team members to challenge assumptions and ask “why?”  Why did individuals and teams make the choices they did about how to play the game and how to interact with other teams. This promotes critical thinking (System 2) and reduces reliance on intuition (System 1).
• Embrace Diverse Perspectives: Assemble teams with varied backgrounds and experiences and thinking styles and push them to generate a good plan of action to optimize results. This diversity helps mitigate confirmation bias by exposing everyone to different viewpoints and giving each player active ownership of the plan of action.
• Data Democratization: Make information and resources readily available to players and teams and accessible to all players. Then, use the measured results of the outcomes to analyze collaboration among players and teams and to draw parallels to organizational performance results. Train them on data analysis perspective skills — looking at actual versus possible / optimal performance results to empower them to interpret performance information more objectively. The focus is on performance, not behavior.
• Promote Open Communication: Create a safe space for open discussion of real issues using a powerful, targeted and relevant debriefing design. Ask about assumptions and reactions to acquiring new information to enhance play. Question about attitudes on asking “The Expedition Leadership” about information, help and support. Encourage team members to share their ideas and concerns without fear of judgment and look toward things that could be done differently that would impact workplace performance.
• Focus on System 2 Thinking: The primary decisions made by players would be System One, where they make a variety of assumptions about winning, support from “adminstration,” resource consumption and other factors which may have been enhanced through more rigorous System Two thought during tabletop discussions. While intuition can be valuable, more deliberate analysis and discussion would probably improve overall decision-making in the organization. Playing and debriefing Dutchman allows for a more measured future approach utilizing System 2 thinking.

Conclusion: A Culture of Awareness and Collaboration

By integrating the insights from Kahneman and the Oracle study, we can foster a culture that acknowledges our cognitive biases, leverages data effectively, and promotes open communication and collaboration. This will empower your team to make sound decisions, overcome challenges, and ultimately achieve peak performance. Remember, a strong team culture isn’t just about comfort and ping pong tables; it’s about harnessing the collective intelligence of your team in a way that optimizes decision-making and drives success.

There are many ways to debrief the exercise, depending on desired outcomes. This discussion focuses more on group decision-making practices but the game can also focus on specific aspects of strategic planning, collaboration and culture, general team building practices or even used to generate broad discussions of what an organization can choose to do differently.

Supervisors can learn and practice facilitation, demonstrate leadership and team building skills and facilitate any number of real ideas for implementing workplace improvements. The game is NOT about competition but about collaboration, and the game clearly shows the tendency of individuals and teams to compete rather than work together to optimize performance.

The game clearly focuses on issues of alignment to shared goals and objectives, missions and vision. It is a great tool to use to embed a culture of collaboration and high performance or to generate more group decision making in the normal business practices.

The many game metaphors are clean and explanatory, such as Spectator Sheep and Mud and the exercise is packaged with a wide variety of images that can serve to anchor discussions and memory.

A collection of possible images to embed in your debriefing and your followup meetings.