Insight

Three Wrong Calls and the Shortcut That Made Them

Miles·Wednesday, September 2, 2026 Edition

ONE PERSON, ONE WRONG ROOM

Fumiko Adeyemi is sitting at a long conference table, the overhead lights humming faintly, a printed spreadsheet in front of her. She is forty minutes into reviewing candidates for a team lead role. Her coffee has gone cold. She circles a name near the top of the first page and feels, without quite knowing why, that the decision is already made.

A bias is not a crack in your character — it is a rule of thumb that evolved for a world slightly different from the one you are currently standing in. Anchoring, availability, the halo effect: each one is a compression algorithm, a way of reaching a good-enough answer fast when the cost of deliberation is too high. The algorithm isn't broken. What's broken is the fit between the algorithm and the current task. That distinction matters enormously, because a flaw in your character calls for therapy, but a misapplied heuristic calls for a better system.

A bias is not a crack in your character — it is a rule of thumb that evolved for a world slightly different from the one you are currently standing in.

Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking — laid out in his 2011 book. Documented exactly this: fast thinking isn't inferior thinking, it is contextually tuned thinking running out of context. The research showed that experienced judges gave harsher rulings before lunch than after, not because they were cruel people, but because depletion degrades the override mechanism, not the underlying judgment. The bias doesn't disappear when you are smart or senior. It recalibrates when you build in the pause that your cognitive architecture cannot generate on its own.

THE DECISION YOU'RE ABOUT TO MAKE

Say you are an hour out from telling your manager that the project timeline is wrong, and that you told her it was fine two weeks ago. You will walk in already anchored to that original number, already primed to defend a position rather than update it. Before you open the door, write the actual figure you now believe is true. Not the one that started this, the one the data supports today. Fumiko could have done the same thing with her spreadsheet. Written her ranking before she saw which name sat at the top of the page. Sequence shapes perception, so change the sequence.

The shortcut isn't the enemy. Running it without knowing you're running it is. Most people spend their careers trying to think better. The ones who actually improve build small structures that make the bias irrelevant before it fires.

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Try This

Before your next significant judgment call, write your conclusion down before you gather the full input — your instinct, your number, your preference, whatever it is. Compare what you wrote to where you land after the information arrives, and look at the gap.

How?

Key Facts

*A cognitive bias is a heuristic running outside its intended conditions, not evidence that you reason poorly.

*Identifying which specific shortcut is active in a given moment lets you design a check before the decision lands, not after.

*Before a high-stakes conversation or judgment call, name the bias aloud — availability, anchoring, or otherwise — because naming it interrupts its automatic run.