BIAS CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP, How Diversity Leads To Better Decision-Making

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BIAS
CONSCIOUS
LEADERSHIP
How diversity
leads to better
decision-making
Bias-conscious Leadership: How diversity leads to better decision-making
English translation: Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov 2022

Original Danish title:
Biasbevidst Ledelse: Sæt diversitetet i spil og træf bedre beslutninger
1st edition
© 2022
Cover and graphic design: Mette Schou, gipsy graphics

Cover illustration: Hyperbolic plan by Roice Nelson1
Printed 2022
ISBN 9798367232011
Acknowledgements
Such a book cannot be created in a vacuum. Therefore, I would like
to express my thanks to everyone who contributed with professional
insight and brainstorming on the book’s content: Anders Grove,
Clara Hjelt, Assad Jamal, Allan Lyngberg Jensen, Sine Nørholm Just,
Camilla Kruse, Heidi Korsgaard, Majse Lind, Morten Lundsgaard,
Sofie Odby, Flemming Ottsen, Mads Skovlund Pedersen, Martin
Dam Petersen, Marianne Egelund Siig, Jesper Dalgaard Pøhler, Anja
Rose, Thea Ejby Salmonsen, Allan Sharpiro, Marie Jull Sørensen, Emil
Lindeløv Vestergaard. A special thanks to Professor Sara Louise Muhr
from Copenhagen Business School who skillfully brought a diversity
of thought by joining the final part of the writing process. She was
co-author on the Danish edition, but gracefully declined credit for the
English publication.
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
INTRODUCTION Warm-up for mental fitness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

DIVERSITY REDUCES BIAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
THE LEADERSHIP LANDSCAPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
PART I THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND BIAS IN DECISIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Chapter 1 Effective thought patterns going astray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

A COLLAPSE IN ETHICAL VALUES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
BIAS AND BLIND SPOTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
ANTI-BIAS TRAINING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
GROUP DYNAMIC PITFALLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
GROUP BIAS IN DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
IN CLOSING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Chapter 2 Good relationships create better decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

THE POWER PARADOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
MERITOCRACY AND HIERARCHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
SILENCE IN ORGANIZATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
DIVERSITY MAKES US DILIGENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
USEFUL NETWORKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
IN CLOSING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
7
Chapter 3 Gender balance in leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND GENDER BIAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
INVISIBLE BARRIERS STILL STAND IN THE WAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
WHEN DIVERSITY IS IMPEDED BY STEREOTYPES OF LEADERSHIP . . . . . . . . 91
FROM GENDER BALANCE TO BROAD DIVERSITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
IN CLOSING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
PART II USE DIVERSITY IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 4 Digital leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS A POWERFUL INSTRUMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
RESPONSIBLE ALGORITMS ARE CREATED THROUGH DIVERSITY . . . . . . . . . 116
YOUR JUDGMENT DRIVES DATA ETHICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
TRANSPARENT LEADERSHIP OF DIGITALIZATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN INCREASE DIVERSITY IN RECRUITMENT . . . . 133
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Chapter 5 Behavioral design as a leadership tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL DESIGN? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
NUDGING IN DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
PERSONALITY TYPES IN THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS . . . . . . . . . . . 155
MANAGEMENT OF BEHAVIOR THROUGH THE DESIGN OF PROCESSES . . . . . . 159
BEHAVIORAL MANAGEMENT AS CHANGE MANAGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE CAN CHANGE BEHAVIOR IN RECRUITMENT . . . . . . 170
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Chapter 6 Inclusive leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

LEADING INCLUSIVELY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
8
EMPATHIC AWARENESS OF THE PRIVILIGES OF POWER . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
CRITICAL THINKING LED BY DIVERSITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
COLLECTIVE SAFETY IN INCLUSIVE TEAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
THE INCLUSIVE MINDSET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE THROUGH INCREASED INCLUSION IN RECRUITMENT 208
WHAT YOU CAN DO: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
PART III BIAS CONSCIOUSNESS IN ORGANIZATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Chapter 7 On the way to bias-conscious leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

FOSTERING DIVERSITY BEYOND THE AGENDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
STRENGTHEN DIVERSITY THROUGH LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION . . . . . 222
MAKE DIVERSITY A DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
USE DIVERSITY AS A NEW LEADERSHIP STYLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
IN CLOSING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM THE FOUR LEADERS: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Chapter 8 The organizational start of the journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

A MANAGEMENT STANDARD FOR DIVERSITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
INSPIRATION FROM THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS LAB . . . . . . . 240
ARTIFICIAL, CULTURAL, AND COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
THE INCLUSIVE ORGANIZATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM THE FOUR LEADERS: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Chapter 9 Your bias-conscious leadership training program . . . . . . . . . 255

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
YOUR EIGHT STEPS TO BIAS-CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
9
FOREWORD
Diversity—and perhaps the lack of diversity in particular—in the

management of companies has been prominently in the media in
recent years. It is a debate characterized especially by people who
think that there is not currently enough diversity in the workplace.
The author of this book not only has some thoughts on diversity,
but also genuinely knows something about the subject, and at the
same time, is amazingly skilled at disseminating that knowledge so
we, who need it, can use and apply it.
This is not just a book about management and leadership. It is a
book written for managers and leaders. The author describes the
complexity of taking on a managerial or leadership role in a society
where business models and technology are changing at lightning
speed and where yesterday’s knowledge is already outdated today.
Futurist Alvin Toffler predicted as early as the last century that “the
illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” And this
is how the job of management is experienced by most people—the
11
FO R E W OR D
knowledge foundation from which you carry out your duty is eroded
uncomfortably quickly, and you are constantly challenged on your
skills and predefined ideas.
This book provides thoroughly prepared and very practical sug-
gestions on how we, as managers and leaders, can get into mental
shape to not only be witnesses to or victims of a reality that is chang-
ing at an ever-increasing pace, but also to be equipped via concrete
and well-founded examples of leading the transformation that all
organizations, managers, and leaders strive for to remain relevant.
The recipe is to create room for greater diversity and to understand
how greater diversity, when this is implemented and organized with
care, contributes very strongly to the company’s management devel-
opment and thereby to the company’s competitiveness.
Christina Lundsgaard Ottsen has penned a book that gives the
reader insight into the psychology behind our decision-making pat-
terns, and at the same time, gives us a wealth of practical examples
and easy-to-use exercises so that we can develop ourselves and our
organizations.
Read the book—you’ll likely become a better manager and leader,
which benefits you, your employees, and your company.
Lars Rasmussen
Chair of the Board of Directors and former CEO, Coloplast
12
INTRODUCTION WARM-
UP FOR MENTAL FITNESS
– Diversity strengthens your leadership
Interest in diversity in organizations is growing, and there are several

reasons for this. Many organizations are feeling the fiscal pressure to
cultivate new markets and find innovative solutions. This demands
an innovative brain and leads to strategic pressure to exploit diver-
sity in the worlds increasingly well-educated talent pool. Moreover,
there is political pressure for organizations to contribute to achieving
the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—managerial responsibility
must be taken to ensure a more sustainable development of orga-
nizations. Taken together, this leads to three core arguments in the
diversity debate:
1. Finances—Creating a better bottom line through different ideas

2. Strategy—Using the full breadth of the current talent pool
3. Politics—Taking social responsibility by including several
“types” of employees in terms of gender, skin color, religious
beliefs, political opinion, sexual orientation, age, disability,
national, social, or ethnic origin, and so on.
13

Despite good arguments, it has proved difficult for many organiza-

tions to achieve and maintain diversity among their employees. This
is due to a fundamental challenge that is rarely taken into account.
Namely, strategies for diversity often go against other, more tradi-
tional, management approaches. For instance, the theories and tools
applied and used to create a strong organizational team culture
typically include elements of standardization and unification. There
are many benefits to this—unity, loyalty, and commitment—but such
standardization and unification also blocks the innovation that can
emerge through diversity.
Over the years, many leaders have wanted to create commitment
and community by streamlining their teams. It causes the organi-
zation’s ability to innovate to decline, as homogeneous teams often
have difficulty seeing the limitations of the usual ways of thinking
and acting. At the same time, they tend to reproduce old, familiar
patterns. This is not conscious but happens rather because we are
unconsciously lured by decision-making processes where we agree on
both the process and the decision. Agreeing gives us positive energy,
but it happens at the expense of the quality of decisions. The smooth
decision-making process is often filled with unconscious biases that
are not challenged because we are thinking too alike.
DIVERSITY REDUCES BIAS

Cognitive biases are systematic errors of judgement that skew our
perception. Unconscious biases underly the views and attitudes we
are not aware that we have, but which shape our interpretation of
people and situations before we meet or encounter them. They are
our ingrained prejudices—a filter we see the world through. If we
primarily meet people who are similar to ourselves in situations
that we are used to dealing with, and we make use of data that is
produced by people who are similar to ourselves, then our biases are
14
Introduction Warm-up for mental fitness
rarely challenged, but rather allowed to control our decisions with-

out us questioning them. Perhaps you recognize this tendency from
a meeting in which you presented a solution that everyone quickly
accepted. The others completely agreed with you, and your idea was
similar to other solutions in the past, so they think that it can’t be that
wrong. Shortly afterward, everyone leaves the meeting room with a
nice sense of efficiency. The question is, though, is it the best solution
given that it wasn’t challenged in the slightest?
Breaking with the traditional management habits to promote
diversity demands an active effort from you as a manager and leader.
But it’s hard to break habits—especially if it requires us to go against
the flow. There are a lot of biases associated with our relationships
with other people. For example, an affinity bias, whereby we often
look to join communities where members are similar to each other. It
seems uncomplicated. It is easier. Therefore, we also have a tendency
to standardize behaviors and attitudes in the groups we are respon-
sible for. But that is a shame because the potential for diversity evap-
orates when we try to erase differences. In fact, it’s not just a shame.
When all participants in the decision-making process think alike, it
is directly detrimental to the quality of our organizational decisions.
Imagine the organization as a giant ship that is hard to turn. Those
who have sailed a long time in the same direction have the hardest
time setting a new course and may not even be able to see when the
course is wrong. We, therefore, need to regularly invite new people
on board who see things from different perspectives and alternative
directions. That is the value in diversity.
Although diversity increases the quality of decision-making
processes, it is not easy to maintain diversity in a team or to look
for information in new places. It requires good and inclusive man-
agement. It is vital to establish the difference between diversity and
inclusion here. Many people often refer to an overall focus on diver-
sity and inclusion, but it is important to understand the two concepts
15

as two independent but interconnected processes. Diversity is differ-

ence we can measure. When we work to increase diversity, it is about
inviting underrepresented groups into the organization to achieve a
more diverse employee group, which then draws on knowledge and
data that provides more perspectives on a given challenge. Inclusion,
however, is about making diversity in the organization work by
putting it into play and ensuring that all employees feel like a part
of the organization. Mind you, without blurring the difference. And
it’s the task of managers and leaders. Increasing the diversity of the
organization is one thing; leading a diverse team in a way that results
in better decisions is something else entirely. Here, as a leader, you
must avoid the temptation to unify, on one hand, and ensure that
diversity doesn’t just turn into disagreements and conflicts, on the
other. This requires that everyone feels included in the organization
on their own, unique premises.
Biases are cultural and habit-driven patterns that we easily fall
back on, no matter how much rational knowledge we gather about
them. Therefore, in this book, I focus on reducing biases in a new
way that takes into account that we humans are not so rational in
our decision-making processes that we can avoid biases solely by
knowing of their existence. So instead of studying “bias,” you need to
learn how to think with an inclusive mindset. You can easily practice
this by changing your perspective—preferably with a background
in a mindset that you don’t fully understand. Agreeing with new
perspective is not the crucial point. The idea is that your subsequent
decisions will be better because you have spent some time experi-
encing the situation from a different perspective. Every time you
consider another person’s perspective, you have the opportunity to
grow wiser. You miss out on that opportunity if your way of dealing
with diversity is standardization and uniformization. It takes more
leadership to put diversity into play, but it also makes you a better
manager and leader. It sounds a bit circular—that’s the point because
16
it is precisely the interaction between employee diversity and your

managerial approach that can strengthen your decisions and give
you a more open approach and critical awareness of opting-in and
opting-out of the technological tools you use in your management
and leadership. By maintaining a curious openness to diversity, you
are training the exact leadership style that characterizes the most suc-
cessful leaders. Therefore, diversity is the strongest muscle in modern
leadership development, and inclusive decision-making processes
are your opportunity for strengthening it daily.
In short, this book is about how you, as a manager and leader,
can become more inclusive through awareness of bias and thereby
better at tapping into the potential of diversity. The book provides a
foundation for mental management training and its associated tools.
The book concludes in Chapter 9 with a presentation of a concrete
program that consists of eight steps that you can use to become better
at driving results through diversity. The premise of the program is
that far too many managers and leaders are out of leadership shape
without knowing it. They make decisions based on unconscious
patterns, ill-conceived data, and ingrained routines that weaken the
quality of leadership—not just through concrete decisions, but in the
organization in general. The lack of mental fitness hampers sustain-
able development by marking decision-making processes with the
unconscious biases of both management and employees.
Fortunately, you can actively seek help. With diversity in your
team, you are training your ability to avoid these pitfalls because you
become better at avoiding standardization and habitual thinking.
The book’s training program is therefore about both building up
the ability to include diversity and bringing different perspectives
into play. Getting employees to articulate different perspectives
requires good leadership and management. A sense of safety must be
established before we dare to challenge each other’s points of view.
Psychological research indicates that we all see the world through a
17

filter that is influenced by our upbringing and norms in the society

in which we live. And so, the challenge is to get people with different
backgrounds, attitudes, skills, and competencies to collaborate. This
requires a new kind of management and leadership—or you could
argue that it really just requires leadership. Leadership in this sense
is the ability to explore and unfold the potential of individual team
members and direct it towards an overall goal. When you have a
completely streamlined and like-minded group of employees, it
doesn’t require much management to get everyone to pull in the
same direction, but the return is not that great. If you would like to
create new ideas and move things forward, you need to learn to like
the friction that diversity brings.
That is why Professor Sara Louise Muhr and I developed the con-
cept of bias-conscious leadership—a term for the core skills that good
leaders continuously build by constantly training and maintaining an
inclusive mindset. Bias-conscious leadership is not just a state where
you are aware of your biases. It is rather a reflective leadership prac-
tice where knowledge of the psychological mechanisms behind bias
forms the foundation for creating an inclusive work environment in
which all employees contribute their skills and competencies in the
best possible way. Here, it is relevant to include our relationship to
the use of new technologies, not least artificial intelligence, first and
foremost because human bias is often passed on in algorithms with-
out us necessarily being aware of it. Conversely, artificial intelligence
holds a huge potential for putting different perspectives into play.
Bias-conscious leadership is a new approach to management and
leadership in general. It contains elements from both digital man-
agement and behavioral management, which create and maintain a
bias-conscious infrastructure in the organization through a constant
focus on inclusive leadership and management. Bias-conscious lead-
ership arises in the boundary between technology and psychology.
18
It happens when we invite different perspectives to challenge our

attitudes and thereby minimize or block our biases.
Bias-conscious leadership is not easy. It is a demanding leadership
process that requires courage and humility. But as you will learn
throughout the book, bias-conscious leadership is a great value
in itself—precisely because it is demanding. When, as a leader, you
practice bias-consciousness, you develop as a person and as a leader,
as it is not only about the “handling” of your employees, but about
growing with and in social relationships. Bias-conscious leadership
is leadership development in practice, and you will discover that it
can become a good habit to practice this leadership style in everyday
life. Throughout the book, I share knowledge, tools, and experiences
that you can apply immediately. But before we get started, here in the
introduction I would like to give a brief tour of the leadership land-
scape in which bias-conscious leadership places itself. It is important
to know which leadership and management concepts are drawn on
in order to practice bias-conscious leadership.
THE LEADERSHIP LANDSCAPE

In recent decades, management and leadership thinking has under-
gone a rapid development from more controlling and individual-
focused management and leadership theories to more processual
and relational perspectives. Bias-conscious leadership is a product of
this movement from trait-based and behavior-based leadership, over
transformative, to distributed and relational leadership.
19

Relational and
processual
Distributed and leadership
shared leadership
Charismatic and
transformative
Situation-based leadership
leadership
Trait- and
behavior-based
leadership
Time
Figure 1: Leadership theory’s historical development
Traditionally, leadership has been viewed as dependent on the

personality and abilities of the leader. That is, good leadership has
largely been articulated as a product of the individual skills of the
leader, whether they were perceived as innate or learned. Therefore,
we talk about trait and behavioral theories, whereby the organization’s
success is attributed to the personal skills and competencies of the
big, strong leader. For this reason, these theories are also often some-
what ironically called “great man” theories.
The more nuanced developments of this understanding of lead-
ership were formulated in connection with the development of sit-
uation-based leadership, a concept denoting that the same leadership
skills are not always in demand. The leader required depends upon
the situation. Many leaders who have changed leadership jobs can
nod in recognition of this. In one organization you may be seen as
the best leader ever, whereas in another—despite exactly the same
behavior and abilities—you may have a harder time succeeding with
20
your leadership style. However, in situation-based leadership, there

is still a focus on matching the leader’s personal skills with the orga-
nizational context.
In the movement from situation-based to charismatic and transfor-
mative leadership, the focus shifted from adaptability to cultivating
one particular leadership trait: charisma and the consequent ability
to inspire and engage employees. This is where the “great man”
returns as an updated version: Having now left micromanagement
and controlling management behind them, the charismatic and
transformative leader cultivates a form of management that lets go of
detailed control and focuses instead on creating an inspiring culture
in which employees take the initiative and define their own work
duties and tasks. Committed employees shouldn’t have to be told
what to do, but rather be inspired and motivated to self-define their
duties, tasks, and contributions to the organization. With inspiration
from the great leader, employees become self-directing in the right
way; they work actively and creatively to realize the goals and targets
of the organization. This thinking signified a shift from seeing the
leader as one who facilitates a transaction between the employee and
organization through rules and structures, to one who changes and
develops employees through inspiring and charismatic leadership.
The next step in leadership theory is also crucial; this is where lead-
ership moves away from the leader and is delegated and shared in the
form of distributed leadership. A leader can’t do everything. The leader
is, of course, responsible, but theories of shared leadership focus on
how this responsibility can be fulfilled precisely by sharing it and its
affiliated tasks. Distributed leadership led to an increased focus on
interactions among people, which, in turn, led to relational and proces-
sual leadership. Here, leadership is no longer seen as individual and
static, but rather as a dynamic process that depends on the leader’s
relationship with the employees. If you do not have any followers,
you may be a leader on paper, but there is really no leadership.
21

Conversely, you may also find yourself in a situation where, on paper,

you have no personnel responsibilities, but in reality, you guide your
colleagues—or your managers—through and by your attitudes and
actions. Leadership in this perspective can, therefore, be carried
out by anyone, regardless of formal position. When understood as
a relationship and process, leadership is freed from its trait- and
behavior-based heritage. It is a post-heroic approach to leadership in
which it is no longer the great leader who is at the center, but rather
the leader’s sense for employees and building good relationships.
In other words, it requires well-tuned social antennae and good lis-
tening skills. Inclusive leadership belongs in this management and
leadership paradigm; creating an inclusive working environment is
precisely about emphasizing the relationships that you, as a leader
and manager, help to build—not just for yourself, but also among
employees. More recent theories of management and leadership thus
focus on the relationships among manager/leader, employees, and
the organization. This relationship is nicely captured in the following
statement, often attributed to Clarence Francis (1888-1985), former
chairman of the board of General Foods:
You can buy a [person’s] time, you can buy [their] physical presence in
a given place, you can even buy a measured number of [their] skilled
muscular movements per hour. But you cannot buy enthusiasm …
You cannot buy loyalty … You cannot buy the devotion of hearts,
minds, or souls. You must earn these.
If you only purchase a person’s time and labor, it’s a transactional and
controlling leadership. If, however, you want to develop enthusiastic
and loyal employees, it is necessary to both inspire them and delegate
responsibility and management to them. When you acknowledge
that you earn your leadership position by building relationships with
your employees, you can actively make use of their various abilities
22
and skills. It is on this foundation of distributed and relational lead-

ership, that bias-conscious leadership emerges:
1. Distributed leadership: This is about the courage to delegate.

The act of leadership is moved away from one strong leader
and into a diverse group who become strong by challenging
each other’s perspectives by virtue of their joint leadership.
The focus is on the employees’ different skills and the inter-
action among them as a group.
2. Relational and procedural leadership: Here, all participants recog-

nize that results are created through interactions. Focus is
placed on the awareness of minimizing and blocking biases
so that all voices are included. The central leadership value
is the intentional use of different perspectives.
With this leadership-theoretical foundation, bias-conscious lead-

ership breaks away from leadership as something practiced by one
individual leader. By virtue of your leadership position, you still have
the formal managerial responsibility, but in that lies a responsibility
to delegate as well as a responsibility to include input and initiatives
from employees who think differently than you. Bias-conscious
leadership has, thereby, an exclusively relational focus. Leadership
occurs in relationships and with a focus on how the same situation
can be experienced differently by people who think differently and
have different viewpoints. A fundamental knowledge of how to put
different perspectives into play, therefore, creates great value for you
as a leader, and this will become clear through the book’s focus on
bias—not just in the encounter with others, but also in the interac-
tion with technology. Bias-conscious leadership aims to resolve the
friction that arises in meeting people who see the world in a different
way than you do.
23

As a leader, you can take advantage of the friction among different

perspectives. It gives rise to critical reflection and helps us make better
decisions. Our book is structured so that it gives you the knowledge
and skills needed to practice and implement bias-conscious leader-
ship through artificial, cultural, and collective intelligence.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book is divided into three parts: 1) A psychological knowledge
foundation; 2) Practical tools and methods; and 3) Organizational
context.
PART I: In Part I, a psychological knowledge foundation for the rest of

the book is laid by presenting and discussing studies that uncover
unconscious habits and irrational group dynamics. We look at the
brain’s built-in shortcuts to making decisions and the pitfalls we
easily end up in if we always choose the easy answer.
In Chapter 1 you gain insight into the psychological mechanisms behind

bias and what happens to the quality of decisions when we become too
similar. To challenge the homogeneity of decision-making processes,
it’s crucial to know what the concept of diversity actually covers. In
the remit of work, diversity refers to the stereotypical pigeonholes
in which we tend to place each other when working together. They
are often a mixture of two identity dimensions: demographic and
knowledge-based. Demographic diversity is the type we talk about the
most, as it is often visible in terms of, for example, ethnicity, gender,
or age. But it can also be based on more invisible classifications, such
as sexual orientation, income, or socioeconomic background. Knowl-
edge-based diversity is about our experience and professionalism. Here,
the focus is on education and business area, but there may also be
differences based on seniority and experience within the various
24
areas. In Chapter 2, it will become clear that once you are aware of the
psychological mechanisms behind bias, you can better train your gaze
for the pitfalls. This is especially true in leadership situations where
an awareness of power dynamics in relationships is vital if diversity
is meant to improve your decision-making processes. Power plays
into all relationships among people. Even in the most conflict-free
and informal relationships, there is a constant exchange of power. It
is absolutely imperative to have insight into the psychological mech-
anisms behind power to understand how good relationships bring
about better decisions. Chapter 3 illustrates the challenges of bias in
decision-making by focusing on organizational experiences with gen-
der in management, substantiated with relevant research. We show
how a few strategic breaches of stereotypical norms can make gender
balancing a catalyst for broader diversity. It’s a simple and effective
trick to take advantage of the synergy that arises in gender interac-
tions, as it starts a chain of shortcuts to making better decisions.
PART II: The psychological knowledge from Part I lays the foundation
for Part II, which provides you with tools and methods to avoid the
pitfalls of your daily management and leadership practice. Part II
provides an in-depth look at how to practically put diversity into
play and practice bias-conscious leadership. We discuss how to build
relational leadership skills by combining three popular forms of
non-individual intelligence: Artificial, cultural, and collective intelli-
gence. Artificial intelligence requires management and leadership of
digital development. Cultural intelligence is connected to the more
unconscious mechanisms behind our behavior in everyday life. And
collective intelligence represents our conscious work with leadership
development. Chapter 4 opens with the digital aspect of bias-conscious
leadership to clarify the increasing impact that technology has on
our ability to make decisions. The rapid development of digital algo-
rithms and artificial intelligence has helped us make decisions based
25

on huge amounts of data that we would not otherwise have been able
to process ourselves. However, we need to be aware that artificial
intelligence is based on human knowledge—knowledge that is often
biased and can’t replace critical reflection. Artificial intelligence is
software that is able to consider various options, make decisions, and
learn from its experiences. We use the term in a broad sense when it
comes to our relationship to technology, and we explore how artificial
intelligence can create value in management and leadership. Chapter
4 argues that future managers and leaders will begin to consider
artificial intelligence as the partner of diversity because it can group
and summarize large amounts of data. It helps us sort through the
flow of information from different people with different perspectives,
which are now easier to take into consideration due to technology.
In Chapter 5 we move from machines to humans to examine how we
can block bias with the help of behavioral design without it requiring
a conscious decision. Like digital algorithms, behavioral design can
be used for more or less morally justifiable purposes. Therefore, it
is important both for the coding of algorithms and for the develop-
ment of behavioral design that there is a diverse team behind such
work who can constantly check each other’s ethical principles and
prevent the team from ending up in groupthink. We therefore draw
on the concept of cultural intelligence, which is our ability to create a
constructive collaboration with people who think and act differently
than ourselves. Cultural intelligence is based on a dynamic under-
standing of culture as a community created by and among people.
The concept is also based on a broad cultural understanding in which
culture is found in all relevant differences in the workplace, such as
professionalism, work function, nationality, and organizational affil-
iation—essentially, all the conceivable parameters that can also form
the basis for stereotypes. Understanding what makes us humanly
similar, and yet simultaneously different, is central to cultural intel-
ligence. In essence, cultural intelligence requires you to be open to
26
observing and learning how and why people of both similar and
different backgrounds interact with one another. The second part
concludes with Chapter 6 on inclusive management. Bias-conscious
leadership isn’t just about being able to use algorithms to help pro-
cess large amounts of data and blocking bias with behavioral design.
It’s also very much about being reflexive and developing an inclusive
mindset. Understanding bias and implementing the right antibias
tools is not enough; on the contrary, bias-conscious leadership is a
continuous and never-ending process where you must constantly
be aware of who is being excluded from the organization and how
you yourself can be more inclusive. It is about mobilizing collective
intelligence, defined as a group’s ability to collaborate on perform-
ing different work duties and tasks. It often involves social capital
and the ability to create consensus—elements that are also central to
inclusive leadership.
PART III: The third part of the book brings together the first and sec-
ond parts in an organizational context where conversations with
key figures in the international business community pull the the-
ory into working practice. In Chapter 7, you meet leaders from four
large organizations who share concrete examples and bring their
own experiences into play from their work with diversity. Chapter 8
discusses how organizations can support the work of putting
diversity into play by means of a new management and leadership
standard. We return to the four leaders from Chapter 7 to hear their
perspectives on artificial, cultural, and collective intelligence within
management and leadership. Their narratives make it easier for you
to draw on the three forms of intelligence so you too can develop
your own ability to enter into relationships with both humans and
machines. Awareness of relationships helps you gain insight into
different perspectives on the same issue. It is all brought together in
Chapter 9 with a training program consisting of eight concrete steps.
27

You stay focused by understanding the psychological mechanisms

behind bias. Your understanding forms the basis of your training of
bias-conscious leadership through artificial, cultural, and collective
intelligence. And you are not alone because you draw on the experi-
ence of others who are also using diversity to make better managerial
and leadership decisions. The aim is to make diversity a professional
and personal strength.
Think of diversity as mental fitness. A diverse team becomes your

mental gym where you can train your ability to see the perspective of
others each and every day. Diversity now becomes a means to your
leadership development and not just an end in itself.
Off you go. Time to get started!
28
Part I
THE PSYCHOLOGY
BEHIND BIAS IN
DECISIONS
In the first part of the book, I address how unconscious mechanisms and group
dynamics permeate our decisions. You will gain psychological insight into ingrained
thought patterns. What does bias do to the quality of our decisions, and how can
diversity help us to lead better if we can put it into play? Most diversity strate-
gies focus far too much on the organization’s diversity image and far too little
on the leader’s opportunities to develop through diversity. I seek to remedy this
discrepancy by providing you with knowledge that enables you to challenge your
way of interpreting the world. Your view is not necessarily wrong, but everyone’s
interpretation is based on past experiences shaped by the culture around us.
The ability to critically challenge your thought patterns is a fundamental element

of bias-conscious leadership. Our surrounding environment and experiences form
a framework for our thoughts, which enables us to make quick decisions—some-
times quite intuitively, like when we stop at a pedestrian crosswalk, and other
times, by following the example of others. It’s an advantage on a busy weekday,
but if we always ask the same people for advice, our basis for interpretation is
never challenged, and our framework and routines may distort our judgment. This
distortion leads to what we in psychology call bias.
Bias creates blind spots in decision-making processes. When decisions are made
in homogenous groups, there is a great risk that the blind spots won’t be detected
because everyone sees the issue from the same perspective. Numerous examples
are available of a homogeneous executive board making a series of bad decisions
that, taken together, lead to both disastrous mistakes and direct scandals, like the
banks’ debt-financed housing speculation that started the global financial crisis
in 2008. Fortunately, bias can be counteracted by working together in groups
characterized by diversity. Learning different perspectives is a mental fitness
that sharpens your ability to think critically. It is important to train this ability
because when a scandal hits, it’s often because the critical angle was missing in
the process behind the decisions.
Therefore, in the first chapter, I examine how effective thought patterns can go
astray when we forget to put diversity into play. The second chapter addresses
relational aspects of leadership with a focus on the psychological mechanisms
behind power relations. The third and final chapter in Part I exemplifies the chal-
lenges of bias in decisions by focusing on gender in leadership. This leads to the
book’s more methodical Part II by showing a shortcut to the work of bringing
diversity into play. Each chapter contains at least one company case that outlines
the issue. The first chapter opens with examples from the automotive industry,
which show how homogeneity can lead to blind spots and eventually, scandals.
30
Chapter 1
EFFECTIVE THOUGHT
PATTERNS GOING ASTRAY
– The problem with being too similar
“We totally screwed up,” said the American CEO of Volkswagen

(VW) in late summer 2015 after a gigantic breach of customer and
public trust. At a time of growing interest in the green transition,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exposed deception at
VW with their diesel engines. The car manufacturer’s technological
development had not kept up with the times, and it had become
difficult to live up to the new environmental criteria. The external
pressure caused VW to install software in the diesel engines that
could change the measurement of the car’s performance during
environmental testing. The diesel engines manipulated the level of
emissions, making the cars appear far more environmentally friendly
than they actually were. This shady solution went on for seven years
before being discovered.
The VW scandal became known as Dieselgate. The world-famous
brand plunged in value. Initially, it was a small group of engineers
who got the blame. They were described as a small group with a
morally dubious and ethically flawed basis for decision-making.
31
Chapter 1
But it gradually became clear that this problem was more ingrained
throughout the organization. The scandal revealed a top-down deci-
sion-making culture marked by fear and silence—a culture that VW
has since worked to change to regain consumer confidence.
In spring 2020, however, the carmaker came under fire again, this
time for racism in its marketing. VW was accused of airing a commer-
cial that portrayed an asymmetric power dynamic between people
of different skin colors. The ad shows a huge, light-skinned female
hand pushing a dark-skinned man into a French restaurant named
Petit Colon—the little colonist.2 Subsequent studies showed that the
creators’ intention was to represent diverse love across ethnicities,
but many viewers interpreted the footage as an expression of a glori-
fication of past colonization. The criticism increased when a picture
from the end of the advertisement revealed an unfortunate com-
position of letters that spelled the German version of the American
N-word. In an attempt to accommodate the unexpected headwind,
VW apologized for the lack of diversity among its employees. The
homogeneous composition of the marketing department had blinded
them to how advertising could be perceived by people other than
themselves.
A COLLAPSE IN ETHICAL VALUES

Dieselgate and VW’s failed commercials are just two examples of
how a homogeneous decision-making culture can lead to erroneous
conclusions and a collapse in ethical values. The foundational moral
principles of desirable human behavior, agreed upon within the
organization, slid unnoticed into acceptance of a less ethically correct
norm. When we repeatedly make quick decisions from an ignorant or
outright wrong core, we lose our ethical yardsticks, so to speak. This
warped decision-making entails a new cultural norm that breaks with
an earlier moral standard. What used to be called deceit is eventually
32
Effective thought patterns going astray
interpreted as being within the organization’s ethical framework. The

result is a normalization of deviance.
Collapses in ethical values such as these don’t happen overnight.
Often it’s about a longer run-up characterized by pressures of time
and external expectations. Run-ups call for internal transitions, but
they rely on traditions and habitual thinking. Most of us know this
from our own working life. The pressures of a complex and demand-
ing everyday life cause us to cut corners and make decisions based
on gut feelings that are far more influenced by emotions, culture, and
habits than we are aware of. If everyone around you looks the same
and is influenced by the same culture, then there is no one to challenge
these snap decisions. This increases the risk of bias and blind spots in
the decision-making process, which then paves the way for collapses
in ethical values. The answer is not, as in VW’s commercials, to try
to communicate multifariousness. Many organizations have had to
admit that the risk of hitting off-target is far too great when trying to
apply a norm that they don’t actually possess. Then again, it is possi-
ble to minimize the risk of both a collapse in ethical norms and mis-
communication in organizations in general when diversity is made
functional by putting different perspectives into play. All it requires
is a basic knowledge of the psychological mechanisms behind bias.
BIAS AND BLIND SPOTS

Bias is prejudice: a biased lopsidedness in our judgment that arises
from human interactions in social contexts. These interactions form a
kind of culturally adapted social code that we learn from childhood.
Bias can be both conscious and unconscious. Conscious biases are
marked by attitudes, for example political convictions. They can lead
to active discrimination in the form of racism, sexism, or discrimi-
nation based on age or socioeconomic background. Unconscious
biases can also support discrimination, yet we are not aware that we
33
Chapter 1
are discriminating or making decisions on a skewed basis. But by

blocking bias or making it the object of critical reflection, we have the
opportunity to make better decisions.
There are countless types of bias, each with its subgroups. Search-
ing for a “list of cognitive biases” on Wikipedia will give you a quick
overview of the most prevalent biases (see also Khallash, 2017). But
it is difficult to remember specific bias in everyday life, and knowing
the individual bias is less important than understanding the mecha-
nisms behind bias. Cognitive psychology—which essentially is the
theory of human ability to recognize, perceive, and interpret our sur-
roundings—can help us take a step closer to this understanding. The
so-called Titchener Circles3 in Figure 2 are a good example of how our
senses and the brain’s interpretation of sensory input don’t always
agree with facts. It’s about the sense of sight. Which of the blue circles
looks the biggest to you?
Figure 2: Titchener Circles, also called an Ebbinghaus illusion, are an optical illusion of relative size perception.
34
As you may have guessed, the blue circles are actually the same
size, even if it doesn’t look like they are. The German psychologist
Ebbinghaus discovered this optical illusion in the 19th century. The
surrounding circles form a framework that our brain uses as a start-
ing point for its interpretation. Even when we know that the circle on
the right is the same size as the one on the left, the one on the right
still looks largest. There is, thus, a distortion in our perception, where
our perception of the size of the circles is affected by their context.
The same thing happens on the chessboard4 in Figure 3. Here, it
is just our perception of the color that catches our attention. Square
A looks darker than square B, but when the two squares are put
together, it becomes clear that they are exactly the same color, so what
is going on? On a chessboard, there are both light and dark fields.
When fields of identical light intensity are surrounded by different
contrasts, it tricks the brain into thinking that the fields have different
colors. In this case, our brain compensates for the shadow that the
cylinder casts on the chessboard.5 This kind of optical illusion can be
compared to how bias can distort our views and affect us in daily life.
Although we know that square A and square B are the same color,
they still look different in the image on the left. In the same way, we
can be deceived by bias over and over again, even when we know it
exists. Rational knowledge of cognitive psychology stops bias for a
split second, but it doesn’t help us to be constantly aware of it on a
busy day. The best we can do is invite diversity into our communities
to constantly inspire each other to see different angles on the same
issue. That sets critical thinking in motion and challenges our biases.
35
Chapter 1
Figure 3: Square A looks darker than square B, but when the two squares are brought close together, it
becomes clear that they are exactly the same color.
Bias is, therefore, a kind of framework. You can think of bias as an

interpretive filter that we are unaware of in everyday life. It’s a lop-
sidedness in our judgment that can lead otherwise effective thought
patterns astray. Effective thought patterns are what we in psychology
call cognitive schemas. Cognitive schema theory describes the way in
which we categorize information in the brain. Inner schemas of our
thoughts show that what you remember from your own life is mixed
with cultural traditions and other information from the surrounding
environment. It forms the basis of our imagination and thereby influ-
ences our decisions. In a way, cognitive schemas are the closest we
get to a crystal ball, the ability to predict the future, or at least, devise
possible scenarios.
We prefer to interpret new knowledge buy categorizing them into
schemas that have already been formed. It is reassuring to receive
confirmation about what we already know. But now and then we
encounter knowledge that does not fit into an existing schema. In
those cases, we have to think differently, change existing schemas,
or form new ones (Piaget, 1976). This gives rise to reflection, and
often we experience a sense of resistance until we accept that the
world looks different to how we thought. When the existing schemas
aren’t challenged, they can become rigid and increasingly difficult to
36
change or deviate from. If, for example, you have always lived in a
part of the world where the norm is for dark-skinned men to work
in service professions, then it may have affected your imagination
when you think of a taxi driver. This can lead to generalizations and
expectations that dark-skinned people are not highly educated, for
instance, even if they come from very different backgrounds. The
intuitive and effective way of thinking of these schemas are then
easily transformed into a more ingrained bias.
Bias research is often based on the empirically substantiated the-
ories of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The Nobel Prize-win-
ning partners changed our understanding of decision-making pro-
cesses by combining cognitive psychology with economic thinking.
In the bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman succeeded
in spreading their theory of the difference between reflection and
intuitive thinking to a wider audience (Kahneman, 2011). The pop-
ular division of System-1 thinking as “fast” and System-2 thinking
as “slow” has made fundamental ideas from cognitive psychology
easier for the individuals to comprehend.
The intuitive System 1 runs on routine. For example, a represen-
tation of the world that allows us to avoid obstacles on a walk, all
the while concentrating on a conversation with another person, is
constantly being produced. System 1 thinking occurs when we brush
our teeth, make effortless jokes with friends, and ride a bike. We don’t
focus on what and how we do something. We just do it. Conversely,
the reflective System 2 requires both focus and energy, like when
filling out a tax return or learning how to drive. We can think of both
Systems as constantly active in the brain, but we make most use of
System 2 when we encounter something that puzzles us. This applies
to things that are out of context, something that is new, or something
that seems like a mistake. Puzzlement most often occurs because the
thing we are facing or dealing with doesn’t fit into our current cog-
nitive schemas. But most of the time, we let the habit-based System
37
Chapter 1
1 control our thoughts because life would be too energy consuming

otherwise. System 1 is driven by associations among sensory input,
the memory of our own experiences, and the cultural knowledge we
have grown up with, as shown in Figure 4. System 1 synthesizes the
various elements so that we always have a coherent interpretation
of what is happening around us. But the synthesis is always context
dependent. And as we are rarely aware of the historical and cul-
tural context of our own thinking, System 1 can lead us astray, as
we saw with the taxi driver example. Making assumptions based on
an inverted rationale is precisely an example of unconscious bias—
that is, when we treat a dark-skinned man as if he were working in
service professions, even though we have never met him before. In
this way, unconscious biases form a lopsidedness—or a bias—in our
decision-making patterns that can influence our behavior.
Kahneman and Tversky’s (2011) research shows that we humans are
more context- and pleasure-driven in our decision-making processes
than we realize. They divide bias based on three overall heuristics: 1)
Availability, 2) anchoring, and 3) representativeness. Heuristics can
be considered mental shortcuts based on rules of thumb. This method
stems from the habit-based schemas we use when we need to make
decisions quickly and efficiently.
Direct sensory input

in a situation
Accessible Interpretation based

memory on cultural knowledge
Figure 4: Recognition and acknowledgement through the interaction among sensory input, cultural
knowledge, and memory of your own experiences.
38
Availability heuristic is about how our ability to assess topics is

affected by what data is accessible in our memory right here,
right now. The more times we experience or just hear of a
phenomenon, the more frequently we assess that it exists. For
instance, studies have shown that many people think that the
probability of dying from a shark attack is greater than that of
being hit by a falling aircraft. In actuality, more people die from
impact by falling aircraft parts, but this is rarely reported in the
media. Shark attacks, in turn, are reported, and due to media
coverage, information about shark attacks is more accessible in
our memory.
Anchoring heuristic is our tendency to use the initial informa-

tion we receive as a reference point. Preliminary information
becomes, so to speak, an anchor that we place too much weight
on. For example, the opening price you offer for a used car
will characterize the rest of the negotiation with the vendor.
In fact, studies show that we are also affected by numbers that
are completely irrelevant to what we are to judge. For example,
when you ask for the address where a person lives, and then ask
them to guess the price a vase, the average price of the vase will
be significantly higher for people who live at an address with
a high number, compared to people who name a low number.
Representativeness heuristics is our tendency to find similarities

between things to suit our schema-based perception. For exam-
ple, many people believe that stomach ulcers can be caused by
stress because we understand that the two conditions occur
simultaneously. Yet, many years ago, medical science deter-
mined that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium and so
cannot be caused by stress. But because we still connect the two
states, the myth lives on.
39
Chapter 1
Stereotypes are biases based on prejudices about others. They belong

in the category of representativeness heuristics and can be used to
illustrate how easily bias deceives our rational sense. Stereotypes
form the foundation for our grouping of people based on a com-
mon “type” understanding often linked to external differences in
appearance. Here, too, we tend to associate phenomena that are not
necessarily interdependent, such as being dark-skinned with being
uneducated, or blue eyes with being naïve. Our categorization of oth-
ers into stereotypes may immediately seem practical and recognizing
each other’s descriptions gives a sense of community. We can all
picture the person we are talking about when we mention the “dumb
blonde” or “tech nerd.” Therefore, we use stereotypes when we tell
jokes, but often the jokes have an unexpected twist where the stereo-
type surprises us and is not as expected. This occurs, for example,
in the classic joke about the doctor who says to their patient: “I have
good news and bad news for you…”
Now, take a second to imagine the doctor’s clinic before reading
on. Picture both the patient and the doctor.
The doctor says, “The bad news is that we can’t save your brain.
But the good news is we’re really good at transplanting brains. You
just have to choose whether you want a female brain for 4,000 dollars
or a male brain for 8,000 dollars.”
Our patient looks puzzled and asks, “Why is there a price differ-
ence?”
“Well,” says the doctor. “We all know that the male brain has only
been used half as much.”
Ha, ha. But the joke only works because we know the stereotype
of men being more intelligent, which is then trumped by an opposite
stereotype about men being lazy.
An interesting aspect of this joke is that it can reveal our own ste-
reotypical mindset. Think back to where you imagined the doctor’s
surgery. What gender was the doctor you pictured?
40
In the beginning, the vast majority see a male doctor. Some change
it along the way because the joke has a feminist aspect, but the stereo-
typical notion of a doctor is still masculine in its starting point. That
should make us stop and think, given that women now outnumber
men in the number of enrolled medical students in various countries
including the U.S. and Denmark. But our thought patterns are rigid
and marked by unconscious biases. They don’t change as fast as
education patterns. Fortunately, we can help new thought patterns
with behavioral design to better reflect the contemporary situation.
This topic is discussed more in Chapter 5 where we present methods
to unearth blind spots and reduce bias through nudging and choice
architecture.
Rigid stereotypes, such as those about the doctor, turn into preju-
diced biases that can lead to erroneous conclusions in specific situa-
tions. This can have serious consequences, as seen in scientific studies
of discrimination against light- and dark-skinned people, among other
things. Specifically, repeated trails have shown that when the police
stop a person, there is a greater risk that the situation will escalate if
the person is a dark-skinned young man. If such a person reaches into
their pocket, the police have a greater tendency to believe that the
young man is pulling out a weapon than if it is a light-skinned man
performing the same movement (see meta-analysis Mekawi & Bresin,
2015). Stereotypical perceptions can make us react differently in the
same situation. Furthermore, several studies show that stereotypes
can affect our memory. Imagine a well-dressed lawyer pulling out
a knife and threatening a homeless person. When the story is being
retold, it often happens that we remember the situation the other way
around, so it fits the stereotype, and so it’s the homeless person now
pulling the knife. Unconsciously, we create a false memory because
the new narrative better fits into our existing schemas of homeless-
ness and lawyers (see also Nichols & Loftus, 2019).
41
Chapter 1
Cognitive schemas form the basis of all our thought patterns. Ste-
reotypes are just a simple example of how these schemas can turn
into rigid biases that affect our behavior. We can consider schemas
a set of culturally colored glasses that we learn to see the world
through during our upbringing. Cultural studies of the course of life
demonstrate that around the end of adolescence, we already have a
good understanding of what is perceived as right and wrong in the
culture in which we grow up (Ottsen & Berntsen, 2014).
ANTI-BIAS TRAINING
Learning from each other’s experiences and cultural traditions offers
great benefits. We speak from a joint framework of understanding,
which gives fast and efficient communication. Therefore, stereotypes
are often used in commercials where a message has to be commu-
nicated to a specific target group in only a few expensive seconds.
The way our brain categorizes, according to cognitive schema theory,
is not only subject to pitfalls, but it’s also an effective way of think-
ing that we could not function without. And fortunately, in the vast
majority of cases, we can rely on the rapid categorization that happens
in System 1 thinking. The problem is that we rarely detect when our
System 1 has gone astray. It is almost impossible for us to capture the
intuitive errors because System 1 runs on autopilot. Therefore, what
is popularly called “bias training” often won’t help you on a busy
workday. In such training, we consciously use System 2 to reflect on
the phenomenon. It is valuable to know about bias, but it doesn’t
necessarily reduce bias in everyday life. Over the past decade, two
sociology professors, Frank Dobbin and Alexander Kalev, have been
researching various forms of this training. Their pervasive message is
that many of the current diversity programs neither reduce bias nor
change behavior (See Dobbin & Kalev, 2018). Here is why and what
to do instead.
42
There is something appealing about believing that we can learn a

number of biases, and thereby, steer clear of them. The thought and
intention is good, but it’s not that simple. Bias is not something that
can be trained. The term “anti-bias training” is more correct, but often,
such courses are organized with blind faith in the rational human
being. It’s easy to relate to a list of biases and learn them by heart, but
it doesn’t help in a busy everyday life, where our rational capacity is
preferably used to solve work-related issues. A fundamental under-
standing of the psychological mechanisms behind bias is necessary
to be able to challenge bias, but the best strategy is a combination
of inviting diversity into your decision-making and practicing your
inclusive mindset daily, while blocking bias with behavioral design
and digital leadership (more about that in Part II of the book). The
problem with anti-bias training programs is that while most employ-
ees can learn to answer a bias questionnaire correctly, the answers are
not necessarily reflected in their actions, and often, the answers are
forgotten within a few days after the training. In other words, anti-
bias training often has only a short-term effect unless it is combined
with other initiatives (Forscher et al., 2019).
In fact, Dobbin and Kalev’s research shows that many anti-bias
training programs can backfire, as they activate biases instead of
eliminating them. Various studies show that when people are made
aware of their biases and are then asked to suppress them, they can
end up with amplified biases (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). One of
Kalev’s studies on recruitment demonstrated that leaders who had
received anti-bias training subsequently ended up being even more
discriminatory when hiring. The program in question had a legiti-
mizing effect where the individual manager or leader believed that
now that they had learned about bias, it was no longer an issue. Anti-
bias training must, therefore, focus on the limitations of both intuitive
and reflective ways of thinking. Dobbin and Kalev (2013) advise that
information on bias should always be included in a larger program,
43
Chapter 1
where diversity is constantly supported by organizational measures.

That is, anti-bias training should make you aware of where and when
bias is potentially affecting your decisions, so you know when you
need help to change your behavior.
In other words, change in behavior comes by deliberately blocking
bias in advance—for example, through the design of processes and
procedures, which we take a closer look at in Chapter 5 (see also
Muhr, 2019).
A core point here in Part I of the book is that cognitive schemas help
us to make effective decisions based on direct sensory input, which
are interpreted from what we remember from our experiences in a
common cultural framework (Figure 4). The disadvantage is that the
common understanding framework can become so ingrained and rigid
that we come to perceive our cognitive schemas as laws of nature. We
assume that everyone thinks and does as we do. Only when we move
across national borders, for instance, do we learn that what we thought
were universal truths are often valued and tackled quite differently
elsewhere in the world. Encountering other cultures challenges our
cognitive schemas. Our cultural glasses are lifted, and we get the oppor-
tunity to switch to a new set of glasses that gives rise to a different way
of looking at the world. Living in a new culture is a good exercise, but
we do not have to cross borders to be inspired. If we invite diversity
into everyday life, it may be enough for us to challenge each other in
how we think and make diversity work across all possible boundaries.
It is a duty of leadership that requires psychological insight into how
we behave in groups and in decision-making processes.
GROUP DYNAMIC PITFALLS

Humans seek cohesion in groups and form social networks. Sharing
knowledge across experiences enables us to learn from each other.
But all too often, knowledge is lost in our eagerness to fit in. The need
44
to be part of the flock lies deep within us. We are driven by herd
mentality, an unconscious bias that often makes us follow others
blindly. When enough other people do the same thing, we interpret it
as social proof that it’s the right thing to do. It’s a quick way to decide,
and for the most part, it works out well. But if the decisions are never
challenged, at some point, everyone just following the herd will mis-
step. Scientific studies show that it is surprisingly rare that we go
against the norm. For example, herd mentality is a powerful driving
force behind investment bubbles (Suchanek, 2021). We buy shares
that other people buy until the prices become unrealistically high.
Then the bottom falls out of the market, and everyone starts selling
because other people are selling. The starting point is not necessarily
wrong, but the result becomes skewed and exaggerated when we
are too many people following each other blindly. Unconscious herd
mentality can entice us to make bad decisions. Think of the initial
case of VW’s Dieselgate in which a large number of employees ended
up supporting the development of software that was created only to
circumvent the applicable environmental regulations.
On the conscious level, we also have challenges when we are in
groups. It is very important for us to be well-liked, and therefore,
social relationships often become more important to us than the truth.
We prefer not to admit it, but that’s the way we behave. Scientific
studies show that when we know information that can cause us to
lose status in a group, we often fail to tell the truth to the group. In the
1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his well-known
conformity experiment. He wanted to find out how likely we are to
give in to the group. Asch invited several groups of eight people into
the experiment room and asked them to look at the picture in Figure
5. After viewing it, they were asked one by one which of the lines on
the right has the same length as the line on the left. In reality, there was
only one subject. The other seven were actors who were instructed to
follow the herd and give the same wrong answer.
45
Chapter 1
A B C
P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P7 P8
Figure 5: Asch’s Conformity Experiment
Let’s take a peek into the experiment room. Our subject immediately
thinks it seems like an easy task to name the matching lines. The sub-
ject smiles a little, when the first participant answers that the line on
the left has the same length as option A. It seems like a clear mistake,
as A is somewhat shorter. But participants two, three, and four say
the same thing. Our subject begins to wonder why the experimenter
isn’t saying anything. After participants five and six also choose A,
our subject starts to doubt themselves. Suddenly, the task no longer
seems so easy. The subject may begin to believe that they are wrong
or have misunderstood the task. It’s not a nice feeling to be that
only participant suggesting a different answer. Asch performed the
experiment in different ways. In total, 75 percent of subjects changed
their responses at least once. Perhaps because they genuinely began
to doubt the length of the lines. But it’s probably more likely that they
changed answers because going against the group feels uncomfort-
able.
46
The same thing happens in decision-making processes. When we

have the impression that the majority of the group finds our knowl-
edge difficult or decidedly wrong, we like to mentally sort through
what we should say in a meeting situation. It is easiest to only share
the knowledge that supports the position in the room and keep quiet
about the rest of the information we know. And if our knowledge
conflicts with the thinking of a high-profile member of the group, it
increases our silence significantly. We comfort ourselves with the fact
that the majority of people in the room may still be right, and we seek
safety and efficiency in conformity. Agreeing seems easier, but it’s not
without risk when it comes to making decisions.
GROUP BIAS IN DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES

When we make decisions with other people, it’s often in homoge-
neous groups composed of people who are similar to ourselves and
have the same opinions and attitudes. Therefore, it’s easy for us to
confirm each other in our decisions, but in fact, it’s not as effective
as we think. Studies show that we have a good experience of effi-
ciency when we are surrounded by types similar to ourselves, but
that uniform groups actually tend to succumb to irrational processes
that harm the good decision. We are all influenced by each other, by
biased attitudes and by unconscious prejudices. The more we have in
common (age, ethnicity, education, gender, etc.), the greater the ten-
dency for us to view an issue in the same way. We therefore quickly
reach agreement and can easily make decisions. However, scientific
studies reveal that there is a greater risk that uniform groups will
not have addressed an issue thoroughly. Such groups may have been
judgmental and unwavering during the decision-making process.
When groups make bad or perhaps even self-destructive decisions,
it’s often because of one or more of the following problems:
47
Chapter 1
1. Groups members fail to correct the errors of their members and

even amplify them.
2. Group members blindly follow those who speak or act first
and/or have high status.
3. Group members affirm each other and end up with more
extreme attitudes.
4. Group members focus on what everyone already knows.
Our homogenous experiences create blind spots that trap us in a

behavioral psychological concept called groupthink. Psychologist
Irving Janis advanced the theory of group thinking in the 1970s (Janis,
1972). Since then, group dynamics in decision-making processes have
been documented in countless studies and trials. Group thinking is a
bias related to herd mentality. In group thinking, we allow ourselves
to be seduced or lulled to sleep by the group because it feels more
comfortable to agree than to ask critical questions. But, it hurts the
quality of our shared knowledge and the decisions made when we
align ourselves to each other.
One of Janis’s classic examples of groupthink is the decision-mak-
ing process that led to the U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1961—also known
as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The Americans, along with exiled Cubans,
wanted to overthrow the Cuban government. Therefore, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration planned an invasion and
gave the plans to President John F. Kennedy’s administration when
he took over the presidency in 1961. Kennedy accepted the plan with-
out question. The operation, however, was a huge failure, and the
Americans were defeated. Not only did the U.S. suffer great material
losses, but Cuba also became the symbol for a small island state who
withstood the United States, and thereby, came to play an import-
ant role in the escalation of the Cold War. There were two issues, in
particular, here: First, the trust in the president and the CIA was so
great that the planning group did not question the invasion strategy,
48
including ordering soldiers to go ashore at the Bay of Pigs, which

turned out to be a strategically bad decision due to the swamps in the
area. Second, there was a stereotypical view that Cuba was underde-
veloped. Therefore, the Americans underestimated Cuba’s military
strength and didn’t neutralize their air defenses before landing in the
Bay of Pigs. The attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro was a fiasco due to
a combination of blind faith in authority and a lack challenging one’s
own stereotypical notions, which were instead allowed to control the
decisions being made. The Bay of Pigs example illustrates how the
risk of group thinking is especially great in culturally homogeneous
groups with strong leaders because there is neither the necessary
diverse knowledge in the group to complement each other nor the
tradition of questioning decisions before they are made.
The distortion of a decision-making process becomes clear in Sun-
stein and Hasties’ (2015) division of group thinking into the following
four subcategories of bias that affect the process differently as shown
in Table 1.
1. Error reinforcement is a tendency to exaggerate when we are
with others who think like ourselves. In uniform groups, mis-
conceptions are often reinforced rather than corrected during
deliberation.
2. The cascade effect is our tendency for the initial speaker to be the
one who establishes the point of reference in a decision-making
process. One by one, we relate to that statement instead of add-
ing new, independent knowledge to the debate.
3. The polarization effect denotes the decision group’s tendency to
become more extreme in its joint position in line with its pre-
deliberation tendencies than the individual participants were
before the meeting.
4. The shared information effect shows how we find safety in what
we all know in advance, which makes it difficult to take in new
knowledge.
49
Chapter 1
Table 1: FOUR CATEGORIES OF BIAS IN GROUPTHINK
Bias Distorts decisions because… The blind spot …
Error • Groups tend to reinforce miscon- • What we usually do has worked

reinforcement ceptions rather than correcting before and fits the group’s shared
them during deliberation. mental model.
• Joint memory and culture can • Deliberation reinforces the feeling
contribute to maintaining an of being on the right track and
incorrect and outdated strategy. exaggerates what the individual
actually thinks.
The cascade • Knowledge presented by a person • The proposal that first receives
effect with status weighs the most. support is more likely to be
• The initial speaker’s core belief considered the best by the majority.
becomes what sets the reference • The effect is reinforced by
point. One by one, everyone psychological self-censorship and
relates to it instead of adding new non-disclosure.
knowledge.
The polarizing • Groups tend to be more extreme • Groups with a risk-taking culture
effect in their stance during deliberation will typically be more risk-taking.
than individual members were • Conversely, one becomes more
before the meeting. cautious after deliberation in a
risk-averse culture.
The shared • Groups tend to focus on what • What everyone knows is frequently
information everyone knew in advance. repeated in a discussion. Repeating
effect • New central knowledge is gradually shared information establishes a
banished from the arguments, and good mood.
the benefit of expert knowledge • What only a few know must be
disappears. asserted repeatedly.
• The group achieves self-confidence
and consensus, but not sufficient
knowledge.
Groupthink results in more one-track and extreme decisions. This is

especially true in homogeneous groups that have several successes
under their belt. When an unexpected storm erupts, well-established,
50
self-assured groups are poorly trained to adapt to new circumstances.

They tend to reuse old strategies simply because they worked in
the past. They find security in the community and quickly confirm
to each other that they are, of course, on the right track in the deci-
sion-making process.
There are many mechanisms at play when we affirm each other—
both conscious and unconscious. Body language and facial expres-
sions play a bigger role than we think. Our social urge for community
causes us to read unspoken opinions and attitudes in the room. This
happens particularly when opinions/attitudes come from people we
look up to and want to model ourselves after. It is precisely because
we subconsciously target those who are most like us, or who we
would like to be like ourselves, that long-term sustainable decisions
in uniform and standardized groups require more of you as a leader.
Despite it being immediately easier to lead homogeneous groups, it
is generally more difficult to make good, long-term decisions because
the perspective on the issue is the same. A good decision-making
process in a homogeneous team, therefore, demands that you take
responsibility for being critical and encourage critical thinking in
your employees. One way to be critical is to act as devil’s advocate
by asking, “Why could this be a bad decision?” It gives rise to a form
of critical thinking that can reduce bias. I elaborate on the method in
Chapters 5 and 6.
When we look at the psychological mechanisms behind bias, stud-
ies show that diverse groups are good at viewing issues from a criti-
cal lens. This critical reflection occurs more naturally in groups with
diverse members. Studies of discussions among people who vote
for the same political party, but who otherwise have different back-
grounds, show that while their discussion starts with value-based
biases reflecting the shared political position, their different perspec-
tives help to neutralize the bias during the discussion (Phillips, 2009;
2014). This is especially true of bias in the category of Availability
51
Chapter 1
heuristic (material, which is easily accessible in our memory). They

are reduced in diverse groups because each person remembers differ-
ent things, which gives a more nuanced and representative picture
of an issue. Thus, a good group dynamic overcomes both egocentric
bias and value-based attitudes and opinions. We all tend to focus on
our own preferences, but when we consult others, our quirks become
apparent. Therefore, open discussions among people with different
perspectives serve as an important correction.
IN CLOSING
In this chapter, you have gained insight into how similar experi-
ences create blind spots that can become pitfalls in decision-making
processes. Our thought patterns are often rigid and marked by
unconscious biases that distort our decisions without us necessarily
being aware of it. Later in the book, we present concrete examples
and exercises on how to minimize these distortions. But before we
get there, it’s important to practice your ability to see the pitfalls
so you know where to put in the effort. Once you are aware of the
psychological mechanisms behind bias, you can, for instance, train
yourself to spot the pitfalls by using the reminders below. The first
step on the road to bias-conscious leadership is to understand that
consciousness must be maintained and constantly activated—and
that can only happen by interacting with others. Therefore, we must
put diversity into play and let ourselves be challenged by each other’s
perspectives. Bias-conscious leadership is not just about being aware
of your own bias or actively creating awareness of bias in others. The
essence is to develop a work culture in which critical questions are
constantly being asked about practices and behavior; as part of the
culture, we understand that we are never fully aware of our biases,
thus it is essential to invite other people’s attitudes and opinions
into the conversation. This awareness must be constantly expanded
52
and developed. Generally, when the managers and leaders of an

organization practice bias-conscious leadership, they become role
models to other employees, who can then do the same in their mutual
relationships. We will take a closer look at this in the next chapter,
which focuses on the psychological mechanisms in relationships in
the workplace.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:

We end the chapter with a list of things you can do to avoid bias
impeding good decisions. The list is intended as inspiration for how
you can improve your bias-conscious leadership by inviting other
attitudes and opinions into your everyday life. An important point is
that bias-conscious leadership starts with you.
1. Seek advice from people you wouldn’t normally ask advice from.
2. Ask for advice from people you know will disagree with you so you can
address several sides of an issue.
3. To minimize your impact on the discussion in the room, ask questions
and listen to the understandings of others before you make your opinion
known.
4. Ask those in the room who are quiet for their thoughts, so you make
sure that everyone’s knowledge and attitudes come to light.
5. Change the order of who speaks when you hold meetings so it’s not
always the same people who speak first.
53
Chapter 1
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

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Distortions in Managerial Decision Making: Toward an Integrative
Co-Evolutionary Framework. Journal of Management Development, 37(5),
409-424.
Asch, S.E. (1956). Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of
One Against a unanimous Majority. Psychological Monographs: General and
Applied, 70(9), 1-70.
Bazerman, M., & Moore, D.A. Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. 8th
ed. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
Bezrukova, K., Jehn, K.A. & Spell, C.S. (2012). Reviewing Diversity
Training. Where We Have Been and Where We Should Go. Academy of
Management Learning and Education, 11(2), 207-227.
Devine, P.G., Forscher, P.S., Austin, A.J. & Cox, W.T.L. (2012). Long-Term
Reduction in Implicit Race Bias: A Prejudice. Habit-Breaking Interven-
tion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(6), 1267-1278.
Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2018). Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work? The
Challenge for Industry and Academia. Anthropology Now, 10(2), 48–55.
Dobbin, F., & Kalev. A. (2013). The Origins and Effects of Corporate Diver-
sity Programs. In The Oxford Handbook of Diversity and Work, ed. Quinetta
M. Roberson, 253-281. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Forscher, P.S., Lai, C.K., Axt, J.R., Ebersole, C.R., Herman, M., Devine, P.G.,
& Nosek, B.A. (2019). A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit
Measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(3), 522-559.
Galinsky, A.D., & Moskowitz, G.B. (2000). Perspective Taking: Decreasing
Stereotype Expression, Stereotype Accessibility, and in-Group Favorit-
ism, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708-24.
Janis, I.L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of For-
eign-policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
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tions Than Women’. Harvard Business Review. 126, 80-5.
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Giroux.
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Lai, C.K. et al. (2016). Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: II. Intervention
Effectiveness across Time. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 145(8),
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Ethical Decisions. SAGE Publication.
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mænds karrierer. København: Djøf Forlag.
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55
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BIAS CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP, How diversity leads to

Book · December 2022

Christina Lundsgaard Ottsen

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

English translation: Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov 2022

Cover and graphic design: Mette Schou, gipsy graphics

INTRODUCTION Warm-up for mental fitness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

PART I THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND BIAS IN DECISIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Chapter 1 Effective thought patterns going astray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Chapter 2 Good relationships create better decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

PART II USE DIVERSITY IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

Chapter 4 Digital leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Chapter 5 Behavioral design as a leadership tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Chapter 6 Inclusive leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

PART III BIAS CONSCIOUSNESS IN ORGANIZATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Chapter 7 On the way to bias-conscious leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Chapter 8 The organizational start of the journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Chapter 9 Your bias-conscious leadership training program . . . . . . . . . 255

Diversity—and perhaps the lack of diversity in particular—in the

Interest in diversity in organizations is growing, and there are several

1. Finances—Creating a better bottom line through different ideas

Despite good arguments, it has proved difficult for many organiza-

DIVERSITY REDUCES BIAS

rarely challenged, but rather allowed to control our decisions with-

as two independent but interconnected processes. Diversity is differ-

it is precisely the interaction between employee diversity and your

filter that is influenced by our upbringing and norms in the society

It happens when we invite different perspectives to challenge our

THE LEADERSHIP LANDSCAPE

Figure 1: Leadership theory’s historical development

Traditionally, leadership has been viewed as dependent on the

your leadership style. However, in situation-based leadership, there

Conversely, you may also find yourself in a situation where, on paper,

and skills. It is on this foundation of distributed and relational lead-

1. Distributed leadership: This is about the courage to delegate.

2. Relational and procedural leadership: Here, all participants recog-

With this leadership-theoretical foundation, bias-conscious lead-

As a leader, you can take advantage of the friction among different

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

PART I: In Part I, a psychological knowledge foundation for the rest of

In Chapter 1 you gain insight into the psychological mechanisms behind

You stay focused by understanding the psychological mechanisms

Think of diversity as mental fitness. A diverse team becomes your

Off you go. Time to get started!

The ability to critically challenge your thought patterns is a fundamental element

“We totally screwed up,” said the American CEO of Volkswagen

A COLLAPSE IN ETHICAL VALUES

interpreted as being within the organization’s ethical framework. The

BIAS AND BLIND SPOTS

are discriminating or making decisions on a skewed basis. But by

Bias is, therefore, a kind of framework. You can think of bias as an

1 control our thoughts because life would be too energy consuming

Direct sensory input

Accessible Interpretation based

Availability heuristic is about how our ability to assess topics is

Anchoring heuristic is our tendency to use the initial informa-

Representativeness heuristics is our tendency to find similarities

Stereotypes are biases based on prejudices about others. They belong

There is something appealing about believing that we can learn a

where diversity is constantly supported by organizational measures.

GROUP DYNAMIC PITFALLS