For Harvard Business Review
Photo: gemphotography/Getty Images
Summary: Critical workplace issues — e.g., the problematic quality of leadership within organizations, the threats to employee mental health and well-being, and the lack of belonging and inclusion — are primarily attributable to systemic factors embedded in organizational cultures and processes. And yet, many of these and other issues are still mainly addressed on the individual level. Why do organizations keep investing in remedies that don’t work and have little chance of working? An automatic bias in how we perceive and explain the world is a likely culprit. The author explains how that “superbias” manifests — and what leaders can do to combat it in their organizations.
W. Edwards Deming, a forward-thinking American who helped engineer the Japanese economic miracle and was the father of the continuous quality improvement philosophy, wrote that 94% of issues in the workplace are systemic. Only 6% are attributable to individual-level, idiosyncratic factors. Improvements, therefore, should also focus on systems — not individuals.
