According to Your Strategies and Instructions

Socially, our consensus about how we interpret our environment seems to work well enough. But at work, well enough is often not good enough.

Because we rely so much on our agreement of what makes up reality, perceptual errors can be disastrous for team effectiveness. And yet, many managers ignore the power of perceptions and fail to manage perceptual errors.

Perceptual errors are mistakes we make in interpreting reality and lead to ineffective responses and inappropriate behavior.

What causes these errors? Mental laziness. To deal with the information overload, we use mental shortcuts to make quick deductions and draw rapid conclusions.

The problem is that we make up our minds without considering all relevant information. No wonder we misinterpret reality!

Your role, as team leader or as team member, is to remember that people don’t behave according to strategies and instructions. People act on their perceptions.

Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.