Something Went Wrong: 52 Biases That Undermine Your Leadership Decision Making

An Annual Workbook That Reduces Your Biases and Ensures You Make Wise Decisions

This is a book that helps leaders make wise decisions. If you are a leader or aspire to be a leader who wants to improve your decision-making skills, this is the book for you. The book offers leaders an engaging, critical introduction to a wide range of biases in leaders’ decision making. The frequently discussed racial bias and gender bias are covered in this book, but they are only a very small part of the biases in leaders’ decision making. You will venture into 52 biases that play a potent role in leaders’ decision making.

In each chapter, you will learn one bias. You will start with defining a bias, followed by examples that illustrate how the bias creeps into leaders’ decision making. You will then use a section called “Do you know?” to test what you have learned about each bias. You will end the chapter with your own reflection upon the decisions made by you or the people around you. If you work on one bias each week, you will spend an entire year improving your decision-making skills. Throughout the year, this book will be your best companion as you make decisions that influence people in your family, teams, organizations, and communities. And along the way, you will learn about how some popular decision-making approaches can go awry, including:

• How can data and evidence lead us astray in making decisions?
• Why does shared decision making sometimes lead to poor decisions?
• How are we misled in selecting employees and leaders?
• Why do you need to be cautious about experts’ opinions?
• … and much, much more.

After learning 52 biases and how to debias, you will become a leader whose decisions are less biased but of higher quality. If you are interested in making better decisions, you may want to come back to this book annually.

Good information, but…

This is the first title I listened to that used virtual voice. I don’t hate virtual voice, but it did make listening to this title more taxing. Instead of simply listening and processing the information, there is some cognitive real estate being used to monitor if the virtual voice is getting it right. Particularly frustrating is when the author gives you an example and asks you to choose between “A” and “B.” This confuses the virtual voice, and it sounds like it skips, and very often does not tell you which answer is correct. This results in the listener trying to figure out from the following context which answer was correct. Meanwhile, new information is given that the listener completely misses because he/she is trying to figure out the answer to the last question. This would be a great book were it not for the distraction caused by the virtual voice. I’d love it if this book could get a human narrator. 🙏