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tags:uniquenessbiasinfluence
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The paper explores “uniqueness bias,” a behavioral bias defined as the tendency of planners and managers to see their decisions as singular.
Uniqueness Bias
We test the thesis for a sample of 219 projects and find that perceived uniqueness is indeed highly statistically significantly associated with underperformance
Psychologists originally identified uniqueness bias as the tendency of individuals to see themselves as more singular than they actually are, e.g., singularly healthy, clever, or attractive.
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Stems from the fact you are most unique in your thoughts?
This ended up being discussed later in the paper - Following this argument, the root cause of uniqueness bias is localism bias, and the latter bias explains why local uniqueness is so easily and often confused with global uniqueness.
Or it may be a strategic bias used deliberately by planners and managers to lure people to their projects, for instance, based on the reasoning that something presented as unique and new is more likely to attract support and funding than something that has been seen and done before
Academics, too, define projects in terms of uniqueness.
Definition of a project includes uniqueness
A project is a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to undertake a unique, novel and transient endeavour managing the inherent uncertainty and need for integration to deliver beneficial objectives of change
As with other behavioral biases, uniqueness bias results in a distorted view of reality that underestimates risk and overestimates opportunity, thus negatively impacting the quality of decisions.
big, complex projects “are so different from one another that no learning factor or experience curve can yet be applied to them.” Below, we argue this is wrong.
Decision makers and scholars use the uniqueness argument to explicitly argue against the possibility of learning from others and, therefore, implicitly against effectively improving decisions in the long run.
Anecdote where a textbook was to be collaboratively written. Estimates were 1 and half years to 2 and half years for completion. The one experienced member writing textbooks could not recall a project taking less than seven years. Briefly they debated if they should continue, but did. The text took eight years to complete.
The data clearly support the thesis that project leaders’ viewing their projects as unique correlates with underperformance.
Perceived v. Actual Uniqueness
59 projects with a perceived uniqueness score of 7 or higher. Precedence was found in all of the projects.
Each was at most locally unique. Localism bias, as described above, i.e., thinking the local is global, had tripped up the managers, leading to uniqueness bias.
Do Truly Unique Projects Exist?
If a project was ever truly unique, it must be the Apollo program, which landed the first human on the moon. This had never been done before, so how could it not be unique? Or so people argue.
Interestingly, however, the NASA leadership at the time of Apollo sharply disagreed with such thinking. They deplored those who saw the Apollo program “as so special – as so exceptional” because such people did not understand the reality of the program and, therefore, placed it at risk.
Intelligent leaders see UB as a behavioral fallacy and avoid it. The NASA project managers used basic knowledge and technology that was already available and necessary for the job - from hundreds of previous Soviet spaceflights. They saw no reason to reinvent the wheel.
The closest we have come was a suggestion at a McKinsey conference for IT leaders where a participant whose company had been involved in the invention and initial rollout of mobile texting suggested the delivery of SMS texting as an example of a truly unique project. The leader explained that it had taken only a few weeks to develop the app for mobile texting, and no one on the project or outside of it had really understood what it was they had invented. Growth in usage was slow at first. The project seemed minor. Nothing to text home about. No one could have predicted the wildfire explosion in usage that would follow, no matter how hard they had tried, and no other project set a precedent for this. So mobile texting was unique in this sense, or so the leader argued, and many of us in the room tended to agree at first.
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What? No way a unique project.
A host of communication technologies exist that can be considered precedents to texting, even if we limit ourselves to 15 electronic communications, e.g., the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, the fax machine, and forerunners of today’s internet, like ARPANET. A systematic study of the diffusion in time and space of these and other new communication technologies would have given the inventors of texting an idea of the uncertainties and the S-curve growth pattern – with a slow start and acceleration later – that they faced.
Thought
Less experienced, more limited view (provincial) project managers will view their idea as unique. There is uniqueness to details of implementation and facets, but maybe not overall project concept and goals
Could a unique concept just be the wrong solution to a business problem. Basically, can you decompose a bad novel idea into a pre-existing known effective solution.
“My startup might involve the sacrifice of unicorns, which is unique - but it’s a todo app”