Managing Biases in Strategic Judgment

To become successful in this particular community, knowing your strengths and weaknesses when dealing with certain situations that require critical thinking is crucial. Helping people will not always be an easy task, so having the ability to deal with difficult circumstances and situations is key.

Self-assessment exercise also showed self-leadership skills, such as the ability to listen well, think logically, and make quality and timely decisions. At the workplace, such listening skills facilitate the effective sharing of information between the management and employees. Most importantly, critical thinking is essential in the workplace because it helps solve issues experienced at the workplace (Montana and Charnov 31). A good leader is expected to show the direction to followers as they assume their leader is competent and can provide good guidance. In the absence of a good leader, teamwork can be associated with stumbling blocks due to conflicts. At this time, a team leader needs to think critically to identify ways to solve difficult situations. The aim is to make the team achieve its objectives. For these reasons, logical thinking and creative skills are

Decision making biases played a devastating role in the Deepwater Disaster. The biases that were present are; representativeness heuristic, overconfidence bias, confirmation bias and escalation of commitment bias. Based on my findings, to some extent, each of the following biases contributed to the Deepwater Disaster.

Having self awareness is a significant attribute to utilize when leading/managing others, interacting in social events and making personal decisions. Having the insight to distinguish your emotions, then using that knowledge to manage your behavior and relationships is being emotionally intelligent (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). After using the Emotional Appraisal Instrument, I learned that self-awareness is my strongest emotional intelligence (EI) skill and my weakest EI skill is social awareness (TalentSmart, Inc., 2016).

Psychological barriers - Personal problems and worries can lead to lack of concentration, memory loss (dementia) etc. Emotional state at a particular point of time also affects communication. If the receiver feels that communicator is angry he interprets that the information being sent is very bad. While he takes it differently if the communicator is happy and jovial (in that case the message is interpreted to be good and interesting).

Self-Awareness: This is a skill which is related to you. It is the ability to understand your emotions in various situations (Bradberry, T., & Greaves, J. 2009 Pg. 24). It is important to understand yourself first then only you will able to understand others.

Communication should be clear so that the other person understands what you are trying to say. If communication is not clear people may feel isolated, anxious, confused, frustrated and even angry. If people are given clear information they are more likely to understand the message that is being delivered.

Some of my strengths is the ability to multitask, communication, and prioritize and multitask enables these tasks to be accomplished accurately and successfully. Life at home has many tasks, taking care of the dog, making sure the house is clean, cutting the lawn, cleaning the cars, fixing the house if needed, daily chores. While working in a team environment whether at school or on the job, the ability to multitask can be a very helpful skill for the group. I work very well with all kinds of people and I understand that everyone has different priorities and objectives. One of weaknesses in the area of reasoning and critical thinking is rationalizing. I tend to start with a position I already know and look for reasons to support it. I also find sources that agree with me without looking at the other ones.

The first area was the availability heuristic section. There were two biases that indicated whether or not you were making the right decision. The first was ease of recall, or the fact that we tend to decide things based on what comes to mind easily. The second was retrievability, the fact that we base decisions on the frequency of a particular pattern or event. We base many of our decisions on these two concepts.

Rational thinking (deductive and inductive reasoning), Active listening, Persuasion, Critical thinking, Analytic thinking, Social perceptiveness, Ethics and integrity, Human anatomy, Human

Sending a direct message, text message, or email can often be read incorrectly because the presence of the other person is simply not there. This causes the human mind to make assumptions about what the other person actually meant and can make this “conversation” askew very quickly.

Challenges are presented to people on the daily basis. What to eat, drink, where they have to go, who they need to see, and etc... These things all impact the decision making process and the decisions made. In financial decision making, highly successful people do not make investment decisions based on past sunk outcomes, rather by examining choices with no regard for past experiences; this approach conflicts with what one may expect. In addition to past experiences, there are several cognitive biases that influence decision making.

Putting my personal feelings aside and avoid errors in judgment. Sometimes I need to think without my emotions. It would help me not to use snap judgments, negative labeling and stereotypes in my thought process. I should also try learning to use a more creative problem solving, because it helps to approach problem from a different direction and explores news options. It may also help solve easier problems first and help tackle harder problems.

Availability heuristic can be defined as making a choice based on immediate and easy examples that comes to the mind more easily when evaluating a decision. Even though availability heuristic has many pros such as saving time when making a choice, it does come with cons. This is because the availability heuristic distorts our understanding of real threats and risks. For example, Tom is a 10-year-old boy that adores puppies and loves playing with them. One day he saw a puppy bite its owner. Due to this small incident, Tom avoids playing with puppies even though the likelihood of it happening is slim. Since this heuristic draws from immediate and easy examples, it uses system 1 to evaluate our decisions. As we already know system 1 can lead to a lot of incorrect assessments in comparison to system 2.

-The costs which can be borne, and the investment required to compete in the industry.