Identifying Bias

How do your biases hold you back professionally and personally, and what can you do about this? Here’s a helpful method you can use to pinpoint your biases and learn from them.

The Dangers of Bias for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses

Bias can be defined as “a systematic deviation from rationality in judgment”. As an entrepreneur, it’s critical to identify and confront your own biases because:

• Entrepreneurs play multiple roles within their businesses; unchecked biases can result in huge gaps or misconceptions.

• Bias is our brain’s way of trying to speed up decision-making, but we don’t make the best decisions at speed! To make sustainable decisions, entrepreneurs must balance impact against the need to move quickly.

• Misconceptions based on individual bias can have major impacts on a small business’s financial viability or reputation.

• Entrepreneurs will benefit from expanding their perspectives to create more inclusive solutions and practices as they grow a team or a user base.

• We are not our customers or users, even if we may fit the demographics. Seeing our target user through our perspective becomes an anchoring bias that will limit growth and potential viability.

What is The Johari Window Model?

The Johari Window Model, developed in 1955 by two American psychologists, is a useful framework for reflecting on your own biases to increase self-awareness and facilitate growth. The model is divided into four quadrants as follows:

To adjust the Johari Window Model for your entrepreneurship journey, reflect on each quadrant in the framework by considering your:

• Feelings and motivations

• Limitations

• Responses to feedback

• Adaptability

• Skills and habits

• Communication skills.

Then, seek out honest perspectives from friends, family members, or former coworkers to identify outside perspectives and find out where your self-perception diverges from others’ opinions.

With this exercise, the aim is to increase your area within the Open Self quadrant and reduce the quadrants that may be damaging or limiting to your growth, be it professionally or personally.

Let’s look at an example of an entrepreneur’s Johari Window Model canvas:

Does any of this sound familiar?

If you’d like to test this out yourself, here’s a free template for you to download and use.

The Johari Window Model is just one method of identifying and reflecting on biases. In the comments, let me know how important it is for you to address bias in your role and what methods you use to do this!