How the Cognitive Bias of "Bikeshedding" Causes Us to Waste Precious Time on Trivial Things

Описание: A cognitive bias, like Parkinson's Law of Triviality discussed here, is a common source of impaired judgement that can lessen the effectiveness of our decisions.

The nature of our brains and perceptions makes them nearly impossible to avoid, but the more awareness we have of theses biases and their effects, the better chance we stand.

In this video, John Kuder and Connie Kuder, of Kuder Consulting Group, discuss the nature of this bias with humor and relate it to things we do every day.

Bikeshedding is the nickname given to a corollary of Parkinson’s Law that Mr. Parkinson created in 1957. He called it the “Law of Triviality.”

It goes like this: "The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.” He illustrated the idea with an exaggerated story about a committee meeting with three items on the agenda: discussing the construction of a nuclear power plant for $10 million, the construction of a bike storage shed for $2,000, and the coffee budget for the committee meetings.

The committee spent two and a half minutes discussing the nuclear plant and forty-five minutes talking about the bike shed.

Bikeshedding can cause you to waste your time. You might spend all your time doing something that doesn't matter at all, like checking email 50 times a day, or endlessly scrolling through social media. Or you might use all your time doing something easy that really isn't worth doing, just to check off an item on a list.

Cognitive biases are a form of mental model that work mostly against us. Expanding our knowledge and use of mental models, especially Mind Models™, can improve both our decision making and our emotional intelligence (EQ or EI).

Learn about some special, easy-to-learn skills that can help you minimize cognitive biases in your thinking. Visit our website at https://kuderconsultinggroup.com/what...

To learn more about how family business coaching with Mind Models™ could benefit you and your business, visit our website at https://kuderconsultinggroup.com/

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Thinking About Thinking:
Learning about mental models and cognitive biases is a step towards training ourselves to notice how we are thinking, which is a level deeper than what we are thinking about. Self-made billionaires like Warren Buffet and his partner Charlie Munger, Sara Blakely, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates all use mental models to shape their thinking and make effective decisions. In particular, being conscious of how we think helps us deal with what we don’t know.

The Mind Models™ that we teach to our clients are a special class of mental models. They are both a framework and a behavior. They are specifically selected from empirical research to be effective at creating intentional results 80% of the time on the first use.

While there are hundreds of mental models to choose from, there are about twenty Mind Models™ that will address nearly any problem quickly. They are easy to learn and hard to forget, because they are already in your subconscious mind. (Which means they're also in the subconscious of the billionaires I mentioned...)

An additional benefit of using Mind Models™ is that your emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) will increase naturally in all five areas:

Self-awareness.
Self-regulation.
Motivation.
Empathy.
Social skills

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