Hi, my name is David, and I actively hold many biases about the right ways to approach corporate real estate.
All of us have biases. They are formed through teaching and experience. There are many ways that biases both help and hinder us in our everyday lives. Sometimes making things easier (a bias against a certain route to the grocery store), sometimes they make it harder (it is too difficult to deal with customer service so I am not going to call them today), and most times they are unconscious (the best person to hire for this job is someone with the same background as me).
Having biases is the same thing as being human. None of us can avoid them as our brains are hard-coded to use them as shortcuts. The best we can do is remain open to feedback from others and take the time to scan ourselves to make sure we are not being misled by our beliefs. Many of our biases form relatively early in life yet our experiences should cause them to drift over time. But a deeply held bias may not shift even though all of our learning and experience says that it should. In these circumstances, we could end up making decisions that could very well go against our own benefit.
A few of the biases that I have to actively work against myself in the world of real estate:
- I find myself wanting to trust without question my data and analyses. I must remind myself that data can be wrong or misleading.
- My default position is to simply make a change and worry about the communication later. I must remind myself that upfront communication is almost always beneficial to everyone, including myself.
- I hold a natural distrust of real estate service providers, but I have more experiences where their participation in a process was more beneficial than not.
- Saying “no” to unnecessary projects and processes has become something I do regularly. Sometimes something that probably should not happen could still be a good idea if given new context.
This is just a sprinkling that I personally struggle with. I am certain I have even more that I am not aware of today that may be holding me back. All of us wonder how other people cannot realize that they are making decisions that hurt themselves when it comes to big life decisions. But it is rare for us to step back and realize that we are no different than those people in principle, only different in specifics.