We lean on how something feels when making a fast judgment.
More quotesThe flattering mirror looks like a harmless little quirk until it joins the forecasting meeting. Choosing an enhanced version of our own face is funny because the evidence is literally staring back. In business the same vanity approves budgets. Every founder’s product is unusually intuitive. Every driver is above average. Every leadership team believes its culture will survive the behaviour it keeps rewarding.
Consider three familiar scenes. A team predicts its project will ship faster than comparable projects because this one has “senior attention”. A salesperson explains wins as skill and losses as procurement being difficult. A manager rates themselves highly on listening because they can remember all the times they generously allowed somebody to finish. Self-belief has a use. Nobody builds anything interesting while composing a daily inventory of their inadequacies. But confidence without a calibration mechanism becomes expensive fiction, especially when everyone nearby shares the same incentive.
Skip the ritual self-flagellation and create feedback that refuses to flatter: compare forecasts with outcomes; ask colleagues about observable behaviour rather than vague virtue; use base rates before announcing that this case is special; record the prediction before memory gives it a tasteful renovation. We mark our own homework generously. Keep the original workings.