Availability Bias
Recently, your team member A, made a presentation to the leadership team and the feedback was wow.
You need to make a different presentation to the same leadership team. A different team member B, volunteers to make this new presentation.
Whom would you assign this task to? Team member A or B?
The availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.
The availability bias operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.
In the above example, if the manager chooses to assign the task of making a new presentation to team member A, the manager's risk perception is altered by the phenomenon of availability bias.
However, if the manager chooses to assign the task to team member B and requests team member A to help B, the manager would:
- encourage peer to peer learning
- foster deeper connection between team members
- respect "stepping-up" by team member B which in-turn encourage other team members
- be perceived as objective and fair by the team members
