I’ve been thinking a lot about regression to the mean. When I first joined my current firm in 2018, business was solid. But over the next three years—including through COVID—business boomed. Staff grew by 50%, revenue doubled, bonuses were big. And then—things slowed down. It wasn’t as if thing went into a tailspin, but it … Continue reading On regression to the mean
Category: Psyched Out
On hindsight bias
"I knew it all along." But did you? Inspired by my poking around cognitive biases, I've picked up Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for the third time. (I swear—this time I'll finish it!) One of the biases you encounter in the section on "overconfidence" is the hindsight bias. Hindsight bias hardly requires a definition—we … Continue reading On hindsight bias
On the doorway effect
I didn't need to learn the name of this effect to know that it exists. Wait. Why did I come up here? It's only with a single-minded focus, or by carrying some physical object, that I can remember why I have walked into a room. At least once a day, I find myself striding into … Continue reading On the doorway effect
On the well-traveled road effect
I drive the same 2.6-mile stretch of Ward Road at least twice a day. I could give an intersection-by-intersection overview if prodded, from the house on the hill that has yard decorations and blowups for every holiday imaginable to the pig statue that graces the used car lot off of 48th Street. What I couldn't … Continue reading On the well-traveled road effect
On survivorship bias
One of the revelations of my early 30s came in reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion In The Quest For Work You Love, a book that dispelled the age-old career advice “do what you love” The “do what you love” advice is in generous at heart, because it … Continue reading On survivorship bias
On frequency illusion
I was in college when I first heard the name: Baader-Meinhof. And then—in totally appropriate fashion—I started seeing the name everywhere. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as frequency illusion, is when you encounter something for the first time and then proceed to notice it everywhere (where, of course, it already was to begin with). “Baader-Meinhof”—to … Continue reading On frequency illusion
On pricing psychology for professional services
I witnessed an interesting disagreement a few weeks ago between my architect colleagues: Round figures or specific figures for our fees? Everyone agreed that roundness or specificity weren't actually important. Fee development for professional services tends towards ballpark numbers. Even when someone develops a fee based on projected hours, someone in the room is likely … Continue reading On pricing psychology for professional services
On attentional bias
We can't pay attention to everything. Every waking moment of the day, the world hurls information at us. Given the firehose of data pumped in through our senses, our minds have to be selective about what deserves our attention. With bias built into our systems from the get-go, it's no surprise that there are additional … Continue reading On attentional bias
On using the Johari window to orient project process
Despite having loved Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" for years, I only recently learned its origin: the Johari window. The "window" is a 2x2 grid of four boxes with axes of "known to self" and "known to others." https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Johari_Window.PNG The Johari window was developed by two psychologists in the 1950s, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, as … Continue reading On using the Johari window to orient project process
On functional fixedness
This didn't strike me as a bias at first. Though perhaps I'm so deeply affected by it that I resist the category. Closely related to the law of the instrument, functional fixedness is the cognitive bias describing the inability to consider the use of an object outside its typical function. Overcoming any cognitive bias is … Continue reading On functional fixedness
Taylor Coe 
