What is sophistication bias?

Managers seem to have an almost universal problem with sophistication bias.

What does this mean?

Sophistication bias is where people overlook simple, but effective, solutions in favour of more complex or “sophisticated” alternatives.

In every case, this creates unnecessary additional work and complexity, but in many cases this also leads to less effective solutions.

Unfortunately, management generally is riddled with sophistication bias errors.

Management and leadership really doesn’t have to be very complex. The basics are pretty simple (which is not the same as saying they’re easy), and doing the basics well and consistently puts us ahead of the majority of other leaders, when measured on things like employee engagement and team output/impact.

Maybe the area where sophistication bias is the biggest problem is when it comes to strategic planning.

Managers mistakenly think that strategic planning can’t happen until:

• They engage an expensive consultant
• Can set aside days at a time for offsite workshops
• They’ve been through a process that takes months to complete

And even then, they often produce strategic plans that are too long and convoluted for them to be absorbed by the broader team or organisation. And what’s the point of a plan, if no one can understand and align with it?

That’s why we’ve developed three simple Impact Society strategic planning tools that are based on this exact insight:

• The Finding Method in the Madness strategic thinking card deck, which enables teams to have meaningful strategic thinking conversations every week, 15 minutes at a time
• The Strategic Planning Toolkit, which gives you a step by step guide and all the templates to develop a straightforward strategic plan within a few weeks and a single one day workshop
• Our One Day Strategic Planning Workshop, where we come in and run a single day workshop for you and your team. There isn’t a lot of prep required, and you’ll walk in with a blank page and walk out with a complete draft strategic plan on a page, eight hours later