We have build radars for years, and never experienced any result. creating investment theses bespoke for your organization and industry is a time consuming and sometimes strenuous job. It seems like the comfortable quadrants layout, the cozy compact process from adopt to hold and the vast amount of colourful pins provide ample reason for the monkey mind to shatter all over the place, not focus on what to do and dwell  in the abundance of nice things to talk about. In fact, we have made prototype radars with fake and bogus content that have received stellar reviews by senior management. Which might sound funny, but is really discouraging and unprofessional as well. 

Other biases

Our experience with radar love gave us reason to think about the other pitfalls we may have encountered. We identified a few. 

Hoarding. Todays organisations and especially the IT departments are hoarders, always collecting and accumulating. New stuff always seems to come on top of everything there is already. Cleaning up and reorganising is seldom on the to-do list. As a result, organisations become cluttered, disordered and confusing.

Omission bias. Sure, most of us are in no rush to get quantum computers up and running today for our daily business. That is no reason for doing nothing. Omission bias is the tendency to favor an act of omission over one of commission. In general, we notice a lack of urgency for getting things done. Suspending decisions is always the safe option, so it seems. 

Default Bias. Another bias we have encountered many times. People are so loss averse, that they prefer to keep what they have and know over options that are better. For instance in applying state of the art cyber security, a struggle with habitual and well entrenched tools and procedures is inevitable. 

Cognitive dissonance. People tend to see what they want to see, not what is actually there. There are many examples of so called disruption where outsiders saw coming what was happening way before insiders did. It is not hard to see big tech company taking over roles in our vital infrastructure, but we prefer not to mention that war.

Over confidence. Many IT professionals are wee educated and highly trained. They are also overconfident. They trust their controls, but actually have a false sense of security. As they never hear a complaint, they have a false sense of ergonomic performance of their systems. 

Our guess is that every cognitive bias in the book will be relevant to technology management. 

A few rules of thumb

Here are a few do’s we have learned.

Never underestimate the long term impact. Voice recognition, for instance, may not be business grade in your opinion today. But it might be realistic for field engineers to work with voice or facial control in the field earlier than you imagine. 

Be a critical thinker. 
We have to have the ability to question the status quo and criticise it before we can innovate and prescribe an alternative. 

Be curious. 
Empower people to ask questions and seek answers. Inquisitiveness and thinking outside the box need to be treated with the same level of importance business give to physics or math.

Be agile. Our work mindset has been designed for routine and fixed procedure. Learn to continually re-learn.