The BetterBeliefs platform works because it incorporates the latest scientific research on how to optimise human creativity and problem solving.
In recent years the promise of machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data have started to come to fruition. There is increasing attention on the potential effects of technological automation of both physical and cognitive tasks on our society and the resulting digital disruption of traditional industries and innovation driving the emergence of new ones.
Whilst machine learning and AI can process huge amounts of data and find patterns that human cognition cannot, the human capacity for creative problem solving, sense making and interpersonal connection will continue to be essential for organisational success.
The BetterBeliefs platform works because it uses the collective intelligence of stakeholders to help leadership of organisations develop strategic plans. They can then execute evidence-based decisions that align operational activity with strategy, whilst mitigating for cognitive biases.
Organisations invest money and time in developing their human capital, however the collective intelligence, creativity and expertise of an organisation and its stakeholders can be hard to exploit to its fullest potential. Additionally, human decision making is susceptible to a range of cognitive biases. Whilst there are a range of strategic planning activities that allow organisations to build upon their expressed beliefs, it can be hard to capture, track changes in, and influence organisational beliefs over time.
The BetterBeliefs platform builds on collective intelligence to enhance organisational resilience and adaptiveness over the long term.
The BetterBeliefs platform works because it has been designed to overcome the risk of cognitive biases and echo chamber effects by incorporating specific affordances aimed at debiasing expert input by:
- providing multiple and counter anchors,
- prompting employees to consider reasons in conflict with anchors,
- building explicit probability competence, providing counterexamples and statistics,
- capitalising on multiple experts with different points of view about hypotheses,
- challenging probability assessments with counterfactuals,
- probing evidence for alternative hypotheses,
- encouraging decision makers to think about more objectives, new alternatives and other possible states of the future, and
- prompting for alternatives including extreme or unusual scenarios.
We hypothesise that these specific debiasing strategies combined with the positive effects on organisational culture, transparent communication and collaboration opportunities will have a measurable impact on an organisation’s ability to enact innovative, evidence-based decisions aligned with strategy.
