How to avoid biases in your decision making: A guide for individuals and teams.

Biases can be like Jedi mind tricks; they can work for and against us. These cognitive shortcuts can cause us to make flawed decisions, so how can you make better decisions by minimising bias?

Cognitive biases affect various aspects of our thinking, including perception, memory, attention, and decision-making. Our brains use them to process information quickly, but they can lead to errors and distortions in our understanding of the world.

At Thinking Focus, we believe that metacognition (or, as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking) influences everything we do. We aim to help you understand how you think so you can recognise thought patterns and develop strategies to change or mitigate unhelpful thought patterns. Biases are heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) that our brains create to lighten the cognitive load, enabling us to cope with the demands we face in today’s high-paced, complex world.

More Biases

Posted On July 5, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Bias, Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Metacognition, Mindset, Productivity, Video /

How can I improve my self-esteem?

When asked, ‘what gets in your way?’, most of us have the same answer. Me!

However hard we try, we cannot get out of our own way. We spend our life erecting barriers for us to them climb over, acting like a critic and sometimes even being a bully to ourselves.

This is the first of several podcasts exploring the different ways we get in our own way and looking at some simple things that any of us can do to reduce self-inflicted barriers. Getting in your own way is perfectly normal, but you don’t have to accept it as being inevitable.

In this first podcast, Rob and Rich explore self-esteem. How do we understand that we have self-worth in a hyperconnected world where we are asked to compare to highly edited versions of everyone else, yet we have a warts and all version of ourselves?

Posted On June 28, 2023 By Paul Hutchinson In Continuous Improvement, Podcasts, Resilience, The question is /

How to Clarify Who Owns What in Your Projects and Goals

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities with the RACI Matrix

It’s high time to Say Goodbye to Confusion: Clarify Roles and Responsibilities with the RACI Matrix.

Your free downloadable RACI Template

This video is your ultimate solution if you’ve ever experienced organizational chaos, overlapping responsibilities, or unclear accountabilities. We dive into the powerful RACI Matrix, a widely used framework designed to bring clarity and structure to any team or project.

Whether you’re a business professional, project manager, or part of a collaborative group, mastering the RACI Matrix will revolutionize how you define, communicate, and execute roles and responsibilities within your organisation.

Join us as we demystify the RACI Matrix key concepts and provide practical tips on implementing it effectively. We’ll guide you through each element of the framework:

Responsible
Accountable
Consulted
Informed

You’ll learn how to assign clear ownership, establish decision-making authority, involve stakeholders at the right moments, and keep everyone in the loop without overwhelming them.

Through an interactive example, we’ll illustrate the immense benefits of adopting the RACI Model. Say goodbye to confusion, duplication of efforts, and conflicting expectations. Say hello to streamlined processes, improved teamwork, and enhanced productivity.

Don’t miss out on this transformative opportunity to optimise your team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Clarify roles, empower your team, and boost your organization’s success with the RACI Chart. Watch now and embrace a future of seamless collaboration and clear accountability.

Posted On June 7, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Bias, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Engagement, Goals, Influence, Leadership, Management, Mindset, Productivity, Stakeholder Management, Video /

How to Deliver Purposeful Feedback at Work.

Do you want to know how to deliver feedback effectively at work?

In this video, we will share with you five tips on how to deliver effective feedback that will be respectful and helpful to you and your employees.

Learning how to deliver feedback effectively is essential if you want to be a successful manager of people! We’ll show you how to deliver feedback to help your employees grow and learn. We’ll also discuss the importance of feedback in the workplace and give you some helpful tips on how to give feedback effectively!

Posted On May 24, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Coaching, Feedback, High Performing Teams, Leadership, Management, Mindset, Performance Management /

How to make your performance chats easy every time!

Do you know how to make your performance chats easy every time?

All managers love it when they have to give great feedback; that’s easy, providing it’s purposeful that is! However, many managers struggle to hold people accountable during routine feedback or performance meetings. Managers ruminate ahead of giving feedback, catastrophising the team member’s reactions. So they sugarcoat the message, which has no impact and, guess what, leads to no uplift in performance or change in behaviour.

There is a way to make it easier: developing a psychological contract, or as we call it, the expectations chat. This chat aims to establish how the line manager and team members can get the best out of each other, which means giving feedback. So why not agree upfront on how you do that and get the two-way permission agreed upon while there are no issues in the relationship?

In this video, we share a simple four-step process that will make every performance chat easy and straightforward every time.

STOP Trying to Manage Time: Do This Instead

You can’t manage time, so STOP trying to manage time and do this instead…what we mean is start managing yourself against the time and make better choices rather than trying to do everything.

Warren Buffet, among many others, argues that we self-sabotage when we allow ourselves to be consumed by things we care less about – they actually drag us down and distract us from achieving what we really care about.

Posted On April 26, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Mindset, Productivity, Video /

Why You Need to Involve Others

You Can’t Do it Alone

Do you know why failing to involve others is a huge problem?

Well, as they say, the answer is on the inside; in this video, we share how a major client project suffered a huge delay and was almost catastrophic due to failing to involve others, neither the right people nor at the right time.

We share four essential questions and offer more than 50 reasons for how you could involve stakeholders in your project/goals.

Access your 50+ reasons to involve others here:

Copy of 50+ Reasons to Involve Others (Presentation (16:9)) by Ricky Muddimer

Posted On April 12, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Bias, Creative Thinking, Decision Making, Engagement, Goals, Influence, Leadership, Management, Mindset, Productivity, Stakeholder Management, Video /

How to ask yourself better questions to become highly creative!

Creativity starts with knowing how to ask yourself better questions to become highly creative.

Get this right, and you will be unstoppable and be able to solve almost any issue or problem; not just that, you will be able to accomplish so much more and more quickly too!

How to Achieve Your Big and Complex Goals.

Do you know how to achieve your big and complex goals? How to make them easier to work on? If not, then this video is for you.

Firmly in leadership and management development, we highlight practical strategies and tips for making big and complex goals easier to achieve. Setting ambitious goals can be exciting, but it can also be overwhelming and intimidating, especially when you’re not sure where to start.

We share the umbrella goals technique used by client organisations worldwide to think, plan and communicate complex multi-part goals. Then, as with any big goal, we walk you through how to break your big goal into smaller, more manageable steps. Doing so can create a clear roadmap that will make the journey towards your ultimate goal less daunting.

By the end of this video, you’ll have another tool in your toolbox of practical strategies and tips to help you break down big and complex goals into smaller, more manageable steps. In addition, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and confidence to tackle any goal easily and achieve your desired success.

With a burgeoning set of content on all things goals, tune into our Goals Playlist

Posted On March 1, 2023 By Ricky Muddimer In Engagement, Goals, High Performing Teams, Leadership, Management, Performance Management, Productivity, Video /

What is the best piece of advice you would give?

In this special edition, one-hundredth episode of the podcast we explore the four key topics, Productivity, Change, Culture and Leadership to see if we can get each of them down to one piece of wisdom, well one piece each from Ricky, Rob, Rich and Paul.

Without creating any spoilers, you may have guessed that we did not get it down to one, or one per topic! However, we did come up with some real nuggets for each of the areas, so listen in for a quick grounding in how to get things done in your organisation, department or team.

Posted On December 1, 2022 By Paul Hutchinson In Change, Culture, Leadership, Podcasts, Productivity, The question is /