Why Smart Leaders Make Terrible Decisions

You hired someone in five minutes, maybe you killed a program that was actually working. You ignored a massive risk that was right in front of you, and you felt completely rational the whole time. Today we're going to unpack five cognitive biases that sabotage school leadership decisions all the time and what you can actually do about it. Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning.

Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. I'm an organizational coach, and I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions, and create winning teams. On this show, we explore the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership. This episode is supported by teaching walkthroughs and the International curriculum association.

Stay tuned to learn more. All right, I need to tell you about a decision me and a colleague made a few years ago when I was running a department. We were hiring a new teacher, and this brilliant candidate walked in for an interview. They opened with this really, really compelling story about teaching in a refugee camp.

Honestly, we were hooked. The interview continued, but we already decided. In our head, it was a done deal. And when she got there, it was a disaster, not because she wasn't talented.

She really was. But the role we knew needed someone quite methodical detail-oriented. And she came in, she was pretty creative, spontaneous. It was a mismatch, and it should have been totally obvious from the start, but it wasn't.

Why? Because we were totally anchored on that opening story. This is one of the five cognitive biases that trip up school leaders all the time, not occasionally, constantly. And here's the uncomfortable bit, because you can't actually eliminate them.

Your brain is wired that way. These biases are shortcuts that usually work for us. Pattern recognition, for example, it helps you make quick decisions when you're drowning in information. The problem is, in leadership, these shortcuts can absolutely wreck you.

You hire the wrong person, you kill effective programs, you ignore massive risks, all while feeling completely rational. So today, we're going to go through five of them, what they are, how they show up in schools, and some practical ways that you can catch yourself before you mess up. First one then, anchoring. This is the one I actually just described in my Higher End Disaster.

So Kahneman and Tversky, they researched this back in the 70s, and the basic idea is that your brain lectures onto the first piece of information it gets, and then it uses that as a reference point for everything else, even when that first piece is completely irrelevant. They did a famous experiment, actually. They asked people to spin a wheel with random numbers, and then they asked them to estimate the percentage of African countries that are in the United Nations. Completely random wheel spin, it shouldn't matter at all.

But if someone spanned a 65, their estimate was way higher than if they spun a 10. Isn't that interesting? In schools, you see this everywhere. Maybe a vendor quote, for example, an external consultant, they say, their program cost 15,000 and you were thinking something else, and now you're anchored on their number, and every other quote gets compared to that.

Budget discussions. The first department they present, they get attention, their numbers become a baseline. Everyone else is proposal. You can't help but compare to that.

Target setting can be the same. Maybe someone on the governor's says we should be aiming for 85% A's to C's because that's what school down the road is doing, and now that's become your anchor. It doesn't matter if your context is completely different. That number has gotten stuck in everyone's head, and the thing is, anchoring can get pretty dangerous.

Why? Because it feels invisible. You think you're being objective. You're not.

Your brain is doing maths around a totally arbitrary starting point. So how do we fight it? Well, the most reliable way to counter it is to just consider the opposite. When you get that first number or the first impression, deliberately force yourself to think about the complete opposite.

So that concern, quoted 15K, actually think, well, what if this service was worth 5K? What if it was worth 25K? Try to reset that mental range. Maybe do your homework before discussions as well, involving numbers.

What should this program actually cost? Form your own anchor before they give you one. In interviews, there's a common method where people often use scoring system. You might have seen that before they meet.

So you write down what you're actually looking for, and then you score each candidate against that same criteria. This forces you to go past that big story that sticks in your head. Next one, availability heuristic. This is subtle but lethal.

Availability heuristic or availability bias, a bit easier to say, is when you judge how likely something is based on how easy an example comes to mind. So as a classic example, are you more likely to die from a shark attack or from a falling coconut? Well, most people will say a shark attack, but shark attack is the wrong answer. Coconuts kill way more people.

Ding-ish shark attacks are memorable, they're dramatic, they're reported a lot. So they come to mind more easily, your brain thinks they're more common. In schools, this absolutely wrecks good decision making constantly. You're deciding on that new behavior policy, for example, and then Sarah in year nine has just had a big meltdown this week, and that's so fresh in your mind, you design a whole system around preventing that specific situation, ignoring the 400 other students whose behavior challenges are looking completely different.

Risk assessment on our school trip, this is a good one. You remember that coach accident five years ago on the news. It's a really vivid memory, so you're really hyper focused on the safety around transport. Meanwhile, you have barely given a thought about food hygiene at that venue, even though food poisoning is statistically way more likely.

Maybe you're doing professional development planning, and you attended an amazing conference. This is something I can encounter a lot. People have been to a great conference on, let's say, growth mindset, and it was really recent, it was really engaged, and it comes to mind so easily. So you build your PD program for the following year around it, ignoring any assessment data that clearly shows what your teachers actually need.

The things that come to mind easiest and not necessarily the things that matter most, they're just memorable, dramatic, and recent. So when you're making decisions, maybe you should be asking yourself things like, what does the data actually show? Not what you remember. What does the evidence say?

One thing I love, and I know a few of my friends use this, is to keep a decision journal. Write down your reasoning when you make a big significant choice. Three months later, review it, you're going to spot patterns, you're going to notice when you're over-weighting dramatic memories. Before any major decision, deliberately ask, what am I not thinking about?

And this forces you past the obvious stuff that comes to mind really easily. And also involve people with different experiences. We talk about this a lot in our book, Change Starts Here. If Sarah's meltdown is driving your thinking, talk to teachers who don't teach Sarah.

They are going to bring you different examples. All right, next one, the endowment effect. So Richard Taylor actually won a Nobel Prize for work on this. It's a simple concept, big impact.

The endowment effect means that you value things more just because you own them. Not because they're objectively more valuable, but because they're yours. Taylor's famous mug experiment showed this. So like people would pay around $3 to buy a mug, you know, a mug for a cup of coffee.

But if you gave them the mug and then tried to buy it back, guess how much they wanted? $7, same mug, different valuation, why? Because now it's theirs and schools are full of this. The literacy program, maybe you introduced five years ago, it's not really working.

We know it, the data's showing it, the teachers are just complaining about it, but it was your initiative. You brought it in, you championed it, so you can't see at all how ineffective it's become. Or how about a meeting structure you designed? Maybe everyone is just finding it so tedious, but you created it.

So you defend it, you tweak it, you keep insisting people just need to engage properly with it. You can't admit that it might be fundamentally flawed because it's yours. It could be a hiring decision. Maybe colleagues are frustrated, students aren't learning in the class, but you chose them.

You saw potential, so you keep giving chances, you keep making excuses, you keep believing they're going to turn it around. It's way longer than you should. The endowment effect really, it makes you throw good time after bad ideas, and just because they're your ideas. Leaders tell me all the time that they struggle to find a practical way to get evidence-informed practice into every classroom.

And that's where teaching walkthroughs come in. They transform the most effective teaching techniques into five-step visual guides that are actually easy to follow. And what happens when your team use them? Well enthusiasm spreads, teachers improve their craft, and they genuinely love using them.

And I do too. That's why I'm proud to be a consultant for Teaching Walkthroughs. You can find out more at walkthroughs.co.uk or using the links in the show notes.

This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. The ICA have been around for 30 years now, championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools. And what I really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning. This is a model focused on the learning experience, and they have got tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources, and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours.

If you're interested, head to internationalcurriculum.com. Now this one's hard to fight because you need external perspective. You can't actually see your own endowment effect whilst you're in it, but you could do what some organizations call a kill committee.

I've heard Stephen Battler talk about a department in his organization recently, the guy who does Diary of a CEO. So a group of colleagues whose job it is to regularly review initiatives and ask, if we were starting from scratch today, would we do this? If the answer is no, we kill it. It doesn't matter who introduced it.

You can also use premortems. I talked a little bit to James Manning about this recently. Before launching any initiative, you could gather your team and ask, it's two years from now, and this has completely failed. Why?

That's actually a question from our book, changed as here. This forces you to see potential problems you might otherwise ignore. And here's a tough one. Make someone else the custodian of your initiatives.

Give them permission to modify or end them if the data shows it's not working. That'd be a brave move, but it would remove your personal attachment. Okay, next one, groupthink. You've heard of this.

Irving Janis coined this term back in the 70s after studying some disastrous group decisions. Think the challenge of disaster, for example. Spectacular failures where smart people made terrible collective decisions. And groupthink happens where group's desire for a harmony overrides their ability to think critically.

Everyone nods along. Nobody challenges. Bad ideas get approved because nobody wants to be difficult. In schools, this can happen everywhere.

Senior leadership meetings. The head comes in with an idea. Everyone knows it's flawed. Nobody speaks up.

The meeting ends with an agreement. Everyone leaves thinking, this won't work. I wonder if everyone else noticed. Hello, everyone noticed.

Nobody said anything. Recruitment panels are a classic one with this. You've interviewed six candidates. Everyone's mediocre.

The panel chair says, well, we need someone for September who's the least bad option. And somehow you convince yourself that least bad is actually pretty good. It is not. You are settling because the group's pressured to make a decision.

And groupthink can become really dangerous, in my opinion, because it feels like collaboration. It feels like team unity. It is not. It is avoiding conflict, dressed up as collegiality.

So how do we fight it? Well, one good way to do this is to assign someone to play devil's advocate. Not as a joke, but an actual role. So someone, this is your job to actually poke holes in our thinking.

And I want you to challenge everything. You could also create anonymous feedback as well, like after decisions, ask people to submit their concerns anonymously. You would be shocked about what people don't say in a room. And here's a big one.

As a leader, you need to always speak less. If you are the head, don't start a discussion with your view. If you're genuinely wanting views, ask questions, listen, then share your thinking. When leaders state their preferences really early, you know what happens.

It just kills any critical evaluation. Last one is my favorite, I think, and maybe because I'm so guilty of this, is optimism bias. So Tali Sharat has done a lot of research on this and basically found that humans are wired to overestimate positive outcomes and underestimate negative ones. But in leadership, the optimism bias can actually get you killed, because you're launching a new initiative.

You think this is going to take six weeks to implement. Staff are going to really love it because it just makes sense, and I think we're going to get some results by half term. And the reality is it takes way longer than that. Staff have been resisting it because change is really hard.

Results take longer than a year maybe, and they look totally different to what I expected. Or maybe you're dealing with a struggling teacher and you just think, well, actually, if I just have a good conversation with them, they'll turn it around. This happens a lot. The reality is that improvement is often slow, inconsistent, requires way more support than one conversation.

Maybe you're managing a budget deficit as a senior leader and you're thinking that enrollment is going to bounce back, that parents are just nervous, maybe some of the economy or something. But the reality is that the enrollment keeps dropping because the underlying issues are not getting addressed. Your optimism bias has actually made you under-invest in risk management. It's made you under-plan for challenges.

It's made you do that thing we know we shouldn't, which is over-promise and under-deliver. So, Sherritt's research found something really fascinating, actually, and that is that our brains update beliefs asymmetrically. So, if you give someone good news about their future, they'll update strongly. But if you give them bad news, their brain barely registers it.

We're literally wired to ignore warnings. So, how do you fight this? Well, before estimating how long something takes, maybe you're actually going to look at how long some similar things took. Not how long you wish they'd taken, how long did they actually take?

In your school, that last major thing that we did, how long did it actually take from launch to the embedded practice and use that, not your optimistic estimate? And build in buffers. Whatever your timeline you think is realistic, maybe add 50%. I think that's a good rule.

This usually gets you closer to an actual completion time in my experience. Add someone pessimistic to review your plans as well. Every team needs a pessimist, not a cynic, a pessimist, someone who sees the risks and you give them permission to plan for the worst case. Guarantee you this pays dividends.

And track your predictions. Write down what you think will happen, and six months later, review it. You are going to see your optimism bias in action by doing that. And next time, if you have done that, you will plan better.

So, five biases, anchoring, availability bias, endowment effect, groupthink, and optimism bias. Here's what I want you to take away today. You can't eliminate these biases. They are just how your brain works, and they're shortcuts.

They usually actually help you to make quick decisions. But in leadership, you cannot allow yourself to be running on these shortcuts all the time. The decisions you make often matter far too much. So, you need systems, decision journals, kill committees, devas advocates, anonymous feedback, external data.

These become the protection against your own brain's biases. Those leaders who make really good decisions that you know, they're not immune to bias. They are just better at catching themselves. So, I wonder, which bias has hit you hardest today?

Which one did you recognize in your leadership? Pick one, just one, and see if you can think of a system that you could use to catch it before your next major decision. Because the thing is, these biases, they don't actually just affect your decision. They affect your team's trust.

They can affect student opportunities. They can affect your whole school's future. And you owe it, I would say, to them to make better decisions. And you owe it to yourself to build some systems that are gonna help you see clearly when your brain sometimes is working against you.

Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Big thanks to my show editor, Pete McGill. Production assistant, Skyler Rose-Sturman. And for the original music by Guillaume Silver.

Thank you so, so much for tuning in today. As ever, if we don't speak before, we'll see you here next week. If you're interested in learning more about teaching walkthroughs or the International Curriculum Association, check out the links in the show notes.