The dilemma
A midsize industrial company had scheduled a meeting to decide whether to fund a major innovation initiative. The proposal, which had been circulating for months, was for an investment that could help secure the company’s long-term competitiveness. For a business known for its conservative approach, this was unfamiliar territory.
On Friday evening, after a week packed with client meetings and urgent deadlines, the leadership team finally gathered to make a decision. The group was tired. Laptops stayed open, messages kept pinging, and one executive carried on a text exchange about an unrelated issue. As they began reviewing the proposal, they revisited the company’s long-term goals and the original rationale for pursuing this initiative.
Under the weight of fatigue and distraction, hesitation crept in. Several leaders voiced concern about risking capital on a technology they hadn’t used before. One argued that the company had already made many changes, which led to debate about what standard to use to measure innovation. Another pointed out all the past successes the company had as evidence that change was unnecessary. As uncertainty spread, energy drained from the room and consensus hardened around taking a “wait and see” approach. What began as a conversation about building the company’s future ended with a quiet decision to maintain the status quo.
What they missed was that playing it safe was not safe at all. By deferring the investment, the company risked falling behind competitors who were already moving forward. Under the cognitive load of a long week and an unfamiliar decision, the team unwittingly chose the comfort of existing biases over foresight.
The research
The phenomenon the team experienced isn’t a single bias but rather the condition that makes every bias more likely: high cognitive load.
When working memory is overburdened by fatigue, multitasking, or stress, the mind takes mental shortcuts, relying on what feels familiar instead of what’s objectively best. Under heavy load, people rely more on intuitive judgments such as anchoring, status quo bias, or the host of biases evoked in the industrial company’s meeting. From an evolutionary standpoint, cognitive heuristics have likely endured because they enabled survival in situations when quick reactions made the difference between life and death. But at work, they can open the door to biases that a more reasoned approach would reject.
Bias Busters
A study titled “Heart and mind in conflict,” published in 1999 by Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin,1 illustrates this in a simple way. Participants were asked to memorize either a short or long string of numbers and then choose whether to snack on a serving of fruit salad or a slice of chocolate cake. Those faced with the harder memory task were more likely to pick the less healthy but immediately satisfying piece of cake than the nutritionally wiser fruit. Numerous experiments have found the same: When cognitively loaded, stressed, busy, or distracted, people are more likely to take simplistic cognitive shortcuts and default to habitual approaches.2
Unfortunately, modern workplaces, with their “always on” culture, constant distractions and interruptions, and high pressure, almost seem designed to induce knee-jerk decisions.
The remedy
The antidote to cognitive overload is deliberate calm—the discipline of slowing down enough to think clearly when the pressure is high. Teams can build it into their routines with a few simple practices. When a group faces a decision, leaders can use a three-question triage:
- Is this a high-stakes decision?
- Are we in familiar territory?
- Can we change course later?
If the answers are yes, no, and no, the decision indeed carries high cognitive load and is highly susceptible to biases, requiring intentional strategies to minimize them. Meetings about these types of topics can begin with the words, “This is an important discussion; let’s remind ourselves to be fully present.” This should be a signal to close laptops, put phones away, and, if virtual, stay on camera and not multitask, because research has shown that even brief interruptions like checking a phone can interfere with the ability to focus.3 Some teams may bring in a facilitator to observe the group’s dynamics and signal when tension rises or attention wanes, prompting a brief pause. During these breaks, individuals can use whatever method helps them reset, including reviewing the data, taking a short walk, or practicing breathing or meditation.
Organizations can also lay the groundwork for more focused decision-making, such as by monitoring—with the goal of reducing—weekend and after-hours work. They can also aim to limit the amount of “task switching” executives are asked to do, to give them more focused time on individual projects.
When the industrial company adopted some of these measures, the leadership team made its next high-stakes choice in a way that better reflected its long-term goals and aspirations.
Deliberate calm means protecting the brain from overload so that reasoning has the space to do its job. Leaders can learn to make sure they and their teams are not attempting to make decisions under conditions of high cognitive load. By reducing it, taking time, and allowing room to think, they can create an important defense mechanism against a host of biases.
Related Articles
Bias Busters: When good intentions get derailed
How to turn everyday stress into ‘optimal stress’
