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Dennis: Welcome back to Connect and Convert, the sales accelerator podcast where we share insider secrets to make your sales grow faster than ever. We promise, right, Leah? I’m Dennis Collins and there’s Leah. Hi Leah!

Leah: Absolutely. You have our absolute guarantee. That is what we are.

Dennis: Or your money back, right?

Leah: That’s a Canadian guarantee you can take to the bank.

Dennis: As if a U. S. guarantee is no good. Is that what you’re saying?

Leah: Well, I don’t know. I watch the news. That’s all I’m going to say.

Dennis: Oh, boy. That hurts. A deep stab by our so-called Canadian friend here. Well, you know what? Maybe this is an appropriate topic today. We’re going to talk about what I call the “I knew it all along” bias.

It’s the “I told you so” bias. As you know, Leah, I’m a nerd. I’m a big fan of studying cognitive biases. There are over 200 known cognitive biases. I promise, you, I’m not gonna list all 200 today, but I have a couple of favorites. So let me give you a story first to start this off.

An event has taken place. You had no way really to accurately predict in advance what the outcome would be, but after it actually happens, you are very certain that you really knew the outcome all along, way before it ever happened. I have a story about that. Back in my radio days in Miami, we bought a station that was in an oldies-type music format, and there was another station that also had an oldies format, but we knew when we bought the station, there was only room for one oldies format in the market.

So we bought it with that in mind, and we told ourselves that we needed to somehow figure out a way to get them out of it.

That was no easy task. Getting a company to change a format is a big deal. It’s a really big deal. So eventually, the day comes, and they do it. They switched to a country music format. Leaving us the only oldie station in the market. So guess what we said? “We knew it all along. We told you so that was going to happen.”

Really? We didn’t know it. That’s called the hindsight bias, but there are hundreds of biases. What’s your favorite bias, Leah? You probably have a couple of biases.

Leah: No, I’m not really a biased kind of person. That’s not my thing. I’m very open-minded. I like to look at the heart of the matter and then make a decision based on that. Maybe when it comes to Wizard Academy because they sponsor us. I mean, I love Wizard Academy.

Dennis: So you don’t have any cognitive biases, but you are spellbound by Wizard Academy, which is a bias buster.

Leah: And of course, Dennis, I’m teasing because even when we’re kibitzing at the beginning of our podcast, I’m teasing you a little bit about American banking.

I mean, we have biases based on what we read, about the people we know, on our personal preferences. Why are there so many restaurants out there? That’s a form of bias. I like this flavor. If you like that flavor, which Mexican restaurant is the best?

You cannot avoid it. And if you have someone who’s telling you, “Oh no, I don’t have biases,” wow. Be very wary.

Dennis: Yep. For sure. They actually have a name for that one. It’s called the bias blind spot. This bias causes people to easily recognize cognitive biases in other people, but they fail to see the impact biases have on their own judgment. They have a bias for the “non-biased” bias. So how about that?

We tend to believe that our own perceptions and judgments are rational, accurate, and free from bias. I’ve got a newsflash, Leah. If we’re human, and I think we are, we’re all susceptible to cognitive biases that can distort our thinking, especially when we’re not aware. I think the first step in this is just to acknowledge the fact that we’re biased and it’s a blind spot.

We don’t see it, but we can take steps to critically examine thought processes. We can seek outside perspectives. We can use tools and strategies. There are a lot of things we can and should do to eliminate it. So what is the impact of hindsight bias on a small business? Basically, it’s the tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were at the time.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, as they say. After an event has occurred, we have more information. We know more than we did before it occurred. So, “Oh yeah, I knew that was going to happen.” “That was predictable.” “I saw that coming.” Do you ever have that feeling, Leah?

“I knew it all along.” Does that resonate with you?

Leah: Absolutely. And want to have that. We want to have that Gnostic knowledge. We want to be able to think, okay, when I make a decision, I’m very logical. I’m basing it on all of this information. But you said it best, Dennis, a lot of that information wasn’t available prior to it being hindsight.

If the information is all laid out in front of us, what are we going to do? We’re going to create a bias based on that information. When there’s new information that is suddenly relevant, we’re going to change the bias. It’s the human condition.

Dennis: Why is that dangerous in business? Well, when a company succeeds or fails, people often look back and point to the factors that they believe made the outcome obvious.

Well, of course, now it’s obvious. How about Apple’s success? With the iPhone, everybody’s excited about the iPhone to this day. It’s one of the most coveted things that you can have. Many, at first, claimed the product’s success was inevitable. I don’t know if you remember. It was not inevitable.

There was a lot of skepticism. There were a lot of questions. What is this iPhone? Who is this guy “Jobs”? What is this stuff all about? There was uncertainty about its launch, but of course hindsight biases. “Oh yeah, we knew that was going to happen. We knew it all along.” Let’s talk politics for a minute.

This will get us in trouble, won’t it? The 2016 U. S. presidential election.

Many people claimed that Donald Trump’s victory was inevitable, which was obvious in hindsight, despite the polls, the pundits, and the evidence suggesting otherwise. In fact, it was quite a surprise on election night when the announcement was that Trump had won.

But hindsight biases – “Oh, I knew it all along.” Interesting, isn’t it? We have obviously another election year coming up later in 2024.

Leah Bumphrey: What? I hadn’t heard.

Dennis Collins: I know. Well, the news doesn’t travel up to Canada, but I’ll keep you advised on that. I’ll let you know.

So what are the dangers? We know bias exists. We know hindsight bias exists. I can tell you from my own experience of running radio stations for all those years that when we fail to examine our past mistakes or our bad decisions by saying, “Well, that outcome was inevitable or predictable,” that kind of gives up control, doesn’t it?

That kind of says, “Oh well, nothing I can do about it.” See, I have a strong belief in the concept of agency, not ad agencies, but agency. Agency is our ability to do something about stuff. We can control some outcomes. We can fix bad judgments, poor decisions, and past mistakes. But first of all, we have to accept the fact that they were not inevitable.

There are things we can do once we accept that. It also is change resistant. A lot of businesses believe their current strategy, and their current decisions, are optimal. Those are the best decisions we can make based on past success. Dangerous thinking. Have you had clients that fall into that bias – not really evaluating what happened in the past?

Leah: Absolutely. And what it does is it mitigates personal responsibility. When it comes to business, it’s not always a negative. When positive stuff is happening, and I think of clients that I’ve helped with advertising, it always breaks my heart when after a year of advertising, they’ll go, “Yeah, you know what? We grew here and this happened and this happened. That was going to happen anyway.”

That really had nothing to do with what it was that we were doing. That is just as much my fault as it is theirs for not recognizing what happened because I didn’t set them up to realize that at that point in the sand this is what’s going on.

I often like to take things away from the advertising or the business arena. And let’s look at personal responsibility in areas like health. How many people do you know that are not at their healthiest weight, that will defend to death the fact that they hardly eat anything? They don’t eat unhealthy. They cannot figure out where this weight came from because it’s certainly not anything that they’re doing, but if you take away their opportunity for that bias, if you pull it out of the equation by forcing them to make a journal of what it is that they’re eating, they’re in a state of shock. “I had no idea I was eating that much. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know.”

Dennis: I eat 5,000 calories a day? Oh!

Leah: And they thought they were on a starvation plan. So by forcing the issue, it gets rid of that ability for them to just not know what’s going on or not have to be responsible.

Dennis: I like your take on that. The kind of overlooking our accountability. “Well, there’s nothing I could do about that. I knew it all along.” Not a good place for a successful business owner to be.

So we always like to issue a challenge, right? Yes. One, of our closing remarks is also a breakout challenge.

We challenge you this coming week. Review your decision-making process. Take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly. All decisions. Review it. Don’t say that they were all inevitable because they’re not. Some might be. Most aren’t. What could you have done differently with decisions A, B, or C that could have had a different outcome?

Get a coach or consultant to evaluate your situation. You can’t read the label on the bottle from inside the bottle. Get someone you trust to give you an objective view of what’s going on in your business. But by all means, question your decision-making process.

Use a tool such as Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. We’ll do a podcast on that one day. Interesting. Easy process to learn. Easy to use. When it comes to decision-making: game changer. Let’s do that.

Dennis:  As always, I’ve enjoyed this time together. I hope our audience has enjoyed it.

Please write in. Send us emails. We’d love to get them to ask a question. We’ll put you on the podcast. But for now, Leah Bumphrey and Dennis Collins signing off for this episode of Connect and Convert, the Sales Accelerator podcast. See you next time.

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