Hello,
Every founder believes they’re rational.
They aren’t.
You can have the data, the advisors, and the experience, and still make decisions that cost millions.
Not because you’re reckless, but because you’re human.
The truth is, the most dangerous risks in business aren’t market forces or competitors.
They’re the biases baked into your own thinking.
Your brain is wired for survival, not strategy.
When faced with uncertainty, it takes shortcuts, known as cognitive biases, to help you decide fast.
Those shortcuts worked when survival meant avoiding predators.
But in business, they can quietly sabotage performance, distort perception, and lead you straight into preventable mistakes.
According to McKinsey, up to 60% of strategic failures trace back not to bad data but to flawed decision-making processes, most of which are driven by bias.
The goal isn’t to eliminate bias. That’s impossible.
The goal is to see it before it drives your next big move.
Here’s the Cognitive Bias Map for Founders, the five thinking traps I see most often when coaching leadership teams through growth and exits.
You seek evidence that supports your belief and ignore what contradicts it.
Example: Falling in love with an idea, then bending every metric to justify it.
Fix: Appoint a “red team” to challenge your assumptions before launch. Truth needs tension.
You keep investing in something that’s failing because of the time or money already spent.
Example: Pouring more into a broken product because of the effort it took to build.
Fix: Ask this: “If I hadn’t spent a penny on this yet, would I still invest today?”
You overestimate your control or ability to predict outcomes.
Example: Negotiating too aggressively, assuming the market will bend to your optimism.
Fix: Rehearse the downside. Smart founders don’t expect to be right; they plan to be wrong safely.
You assume recent trends will continue indefinitely.
Example: Expanding too fast after one strong quarter, ignoring seasonality or context.
Fix: Zoom out. Make decisions on rolling 12-month data, not weekly wins.
You resist change because comfort masquerades as stability.
Example: Keeping a long-term supplier, tech stack, or strategy long after it’s outdated.
Fix: Challenge every system annually: “If we were starting from scratch today, would we still do it this way?”
The smartest founders aren’t bias-free.
They’re bias-aware.
In 2002, Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for $1 billion.
They passed, convinced their valuation model was right and that their portal strategy would dominate.
That’s overconfidence bias in action: mistaking belief for certainty.
By the time they tried to repurchase Google in 2008, the price had risen to $40 billion, and the deal was dead.
One blind spot. Forty billion dollars of opportunity gone.
Every founder thinks they would have seen it differently.
But bias doesn’t announce itself; it disguises as logic.
This week, audit your own thinking.
Pick one bias from the list and track it for seven days.
Ask yourself:
✅ Where am I seeking validation instead of truth?
✅ What project am I holding onto just because of sunk cost?
✅ Where has comfort become the enemy of progress?
Write it down.
Awareness is the first de-biasing mechanism.
Behavioural economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even trained decision-makers fall prey to bias, but introducing structured challenge reduces error rates by up to 50%.
Teams that deliberately include a “devil’s advocate” or alternate forecast outperform those that don’t by a measurable margin.
The takeaway: debate isn’t friction, it’s risk management.
You can’t outthink your brain.
But you can outdesign your decisions.
Build systems that challenge your certainty.
Surround yourself with people who ask uncomfortable questions.
And remember: clarity doesn’t come from confidence, it comes from contradiction.
The next time you feel certain, pause.
Ask: “What would make me wrong?”
That single question can save you millions.
Because in business, the biggest threat isn’t bad luck.
It’s unchallenged thinking.
To your unstoppable success,
Writer, The Success Method
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