Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
The first plausible explanation for a problem can become the anchor for everything we think and do next. Better decisions sometimes require us to release that first explanation and be curious enough to look more closely at the evidence, especially the pieces that do not align with what we already believe.
I heard the term anchoring bias for the first time on a medical drama. I immediately thought to take note of it and dive a little deeper.
Anchoring bias is our tendency to give too much weight to the first piece of information, explanation or impression we receive.
In medicine, that can mean settling on an early diagnosis and then interpreting everything that follows through that lens. In organisations, we do much the same thing. We hear the first plausible explanation for a problem and, before long, we are no longer investigating the problem. We are investigating that explanation.
Sales are down, so the sales team must be underperforming. Staff turnover is high, so people must be unhappy with management. A project is behind schedule, so someone must not be doing their job. Customers are leaving, so customer service must be the problem.
Any of those explanations could be right. The problem is what happens once one of them becomes the anchor.
From that point, our questions begin to change. Instead of asking why sales are falling, we start asking how to improve the sales team. Instead of asking why people are leaving, we start looking for ways to improve management. The original question has disappeared and the anchor begins directing the investigation.
The first explanation does not have to be unreasonable to be wrong. In fact, the more plausible it sounds, the easier it is to stop looking for alternative answers…period.
Once we are anchored, we start fitting new information into the explanation we already have. A salesperson misses a target and we see confirmation that the sales team is the problem. An employee complains about a manager and we feel even more certain that management is driving turnover. We begin building a stronger case for the explanation we started with.
Eventually…an early possibility can become an accepted truth.
This is one reason organisations can spend significant time and money trying to solve problems that persist despite repeated interventions. The training was delivered. The structure was changed. The communication programme was launched. The new system was installed…yet the original problem remains because the intervention was built around the first convincing explanation rather than the most accurate one.
Anchors are useful when they keep ships where they need to be. In thinking, an anchor can become a blindspot, narrowing what we notice and making it easier to miss information that might lead us to a different conclusion.
Before deciding what the problem is and the solution required, it is worth asking whether our understanding of the problem has become attached to an explanation we accepted readily and without question. Once that happens, everything else is filtered through that first answer, increasing the likelihood that we miss the information that could lead us to the root cause and a solution that actually resolves the problem.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
What problem keeps resurfacing, and what solution have you kept returning to without questioning whether you identified the problem correctly in the first place?
About Giselle
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with leaders across the Caribbean facing problems that keep returning, solutions that haven’t delivered the expected results, or changes that prove difficult to implement.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.”
So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more money trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design an appropriate solution and work with their teams to implement it effectively.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
