SPA Conference session: Understanding Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making

One-line description:A workshop that explores how cognitive biases affect thinking
 
Session format: Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:In this workshop you will learn what cognitive biases are and how they affect our thinking and decision making. We will run through the main types of bias (social, probability-related etc) and look at some of the more significant biases in detail, illustrating their effects.

For most of the workshop participants will work in a small group to explore a particular question. For example: why would an organization resist changes that appear to make perfect sense? Each working group will produce a summary of their findings in poster form and present it back to the other groups.
 
Audience background:This session has broad appeal. It's for anyone who's ever seen people act irrationally (or acted that way themselves!) and wondered why or anyone who wants to improve their influencing skills.
 
Benefits of participating:You will gain from the insight of all the other participants on a number of different problems. We hope you will take away enough practical knowledge to be able to analyze puzzling situations and increase your effectiveness in dealing with them.
 
Materials provided:We will explain cognitive biases and provide summary sheets for participants to use
 
Process:We'll begin with a simple game that will (we hope!) demonstrate cognitive bias in action.
Explain what cognitive biases are and mention a little of the experimental psychology background.
Explain main types of cognitive bias.
Explain several of the most significant biases and perhaps illustrate how they affect thinking.
(despite all the "explain" bullet points above, this should be quite quick as many of these ideas can be explained in a sentence or two)
Provide summary sheets listing biases and providing brief explanations.
Ensure people are on sensible-sized tables (around 4-6 participants per table, preferably mixed groups)
Distribute questions to tables. These will be of the form Why would an organization resist making changes that appear to make perfect sense? and Why would a team make an obviously harmful decision?. It may be possible to gather such questions from the audience TBD.
Allow working groups time to familiarize themselves with the cognitive bias list.
Allow some time for general discussion and scribing within the groups.
Perhaps allow an initial presentation back to the whole group to solicit feedback TBD - very time-dependent
Take a break
Working groups will then produce a final poster, preferably using a systems diagram showing reinforcement effects among cognitive biases to explain the original question.
Present posters.
If there is extra time, pick one diagram and everyone discuss how particular feedback loops could be tackled to overcome widespread or entrenched biases affecting the question.
We'll be on hand throughout the workshop to help with explaining particular biases, but we hope that the list we've chosen will be fairly self-explanatory. We'll also be able to help with the production of simple systems diagrams showing feedback effects.
 
Detailed timetable:
 
Outputs:We'll produce posters illustrating how cognitive biases may create and reinforce irrational systems of thought. Other delegates will be able to view the posters after the workshop has finished.
 
History:Also proposed to XPDay UK.
 
Presenters
1. Duncan Pierce
Amarinda
2. Rachel Davies
Agile Experience Ltd
3.