Insight

Twelve Wrong Calls and Why Your Brain Keeps Making Them

Miles·Sunday, August 30, 2026 Edition

ONE PERSON, ONE BAD CALL

Priya Mehta is forty minutes into a vendor review, a cold cup of tea beside her keyboard, when she realises she has already decided. The numbers on the screen say one thing. The gut feeling she walked in with says another. She adjusts how she reads the numbers.

What happened to Priya happens to every competent, well-intentioned person who makes decisions under time pressure, which is to say everyone. A heuristic is a cognitive shortcut — fast, efficient, usually good enough. A bias is what you get when that shortcut misfires on a particular class of problem. The bias isn't residing in the person — it's residing in the procedure. That distinction matters enormously, because a character flaw requires you to become a different person, and a procedural error just requires a different procedure.

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The bias isn't residing in the person — it's residing in the procedure.

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This is the insight that reshaped how serious decision researchers think about error. Daniel Kahneman's work on noise and bias. Documented across decades and crystallised in his 2011 book. Showed that reducing predictable error is largely an engineering problem, not a moral one. Organisations that treated judgment failures as individual failings kept getting the same failures. The ones that redesigned the process got different outcomes. Same people, different architecture.

WHERE TO INTERVENE BEFORE YOU DECIDE

Priya's moment is yours too. The hour before a hiring decision, a budget sign-off, a conversation you've been framing the same way for three months. Before you decide, write the strongest version of the opposite case. Full sentences, not a list. The act of constructing the argument in language forces the brain to load evidence it was quietly filtering out. You are not trying to change your conclusion. You are trying to find out if your conclusion can survive contact with the counter-case. That is a different thing, and it takes about eight minutes.

You were never the problem. The problem was running an unchecked process and expecting checked results. Fix the process and your judgment. The same judgment you always had. Starts producing something you can actually trust.

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Try This

Before your next significant decision, spend eight minutes writing the strongest argument against the option you are already leaning toward — in full sentences, not bullets. Then read what you wrote and ask only: does my original position still hold, or did something shift?

How?

Key Facts

*A cognitive bias is a flaw in the heuristic your brain is running, not evidence of poor character or low intelligence.

*Knowing which specific bias is distorting a decision tells you exactly where to intervene — at the process level, before the judgment forms.

*Before your next high-stakes call, write the opposing case in full sentences; the act of externalizing it disrupts the confirmation loop that would otherwise go unexamined.