Category Archives: Videos

Of all the logical fallacies that show up at work, this is the one that actually ends arguments: take a wrenching business decision and rename it a crime.

This is 1 of 52 biases in my book “Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself” — free on Kindle Unlimited: https://the3minutementor.com/books/ | Weekly essays: nigeldessau.substack.com

At IBM in the 1990s the guaranteed pension was converted and its value cut for many long-service people. I sat across from friends who’d given the company twenty-five years, and the word they reached for was always the same — robbed. They stole our pensions. A promise had been broken and people were genuinely worse off. But once it’s a theft, only one question is left in the room: whose side are you on? Mention the pension maths, or a balance sheet three months from insolvency, and you’re no longer analysing. You’re defending the robbery.

That’s Godwin’s Law in a suit. Linda Skitka’s research on moral conviction shows why it lands so hard: once we frame a position as a moral matter rather than a practical one, we hold it with more certainty, refuse to compromise, and want more distance from anyone who disagrees. And management does the identical thing from the other side — “we had no choice”, “it was this or the company dies”. Two camps, each holding a label that makes discussion feel like collusion. Between them, the answerable questions never get asked.

The Monday version: when a hard decision gets renamed a crime, don’t fight the label. Split the question in two, out loud. Is it wrong? And is it necessary? Both can be true at once — which is exactly the uncomfortable middle the moral word is built to skip.

#LogicalFallacies #Leadership #DecisionMaking

The tu quoque fallacy — “but you do it too” — is usually a cheap dodge. But sometimes the person pointing out your hypocrisy is simply right. Years ago, a member of my team handed me back my own rule in front of the whole room, so politely I almost thanked them.

In this episode: why power makes us judge others harder and ourselves softer (and hides the double standard from us), why nobody tells the boss, and one test to run before you demand proof from anyone: would your own gut call survive the bar you’re setting for them?

📖 Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself — free on Kindle Unlimited: https://the3minutementor.com/books/
✍️ Substack: https://nigeldessau.substack.com

#Leadership #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking

We make bad decisions and feel completely reasonable while we’re making them — because reason often isn’t the decision-maker at all. It’s the spokesperson.

This is 1 of 52 biases in my book “Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself” — free on Kindle Unlimited: https://the3minutementor.com/books/ | Weekly essays: nigeldessau.substack.com

Intelligence doesn’t protect you. It often makes things worse by handing you more sophisticated ways to defend what you already wanted to do.

In this episode: why loss aversion makes us fund failing projects rather than admit a loss — so that yesterday’s mistake recruits today’s resources; how a temporary feeling disguises itself as a permanent truth; why we protect identities rather than interests, which is why facts alone so rarely change minds; and how our environments are engineered to exploit our preference for rewards now over benefits later.

Plus six guardrails: delay decisions while emotions run high, decide in advance what evidence would change your mind, ask what you’d tell a friend in the same spot, ignore what’s already spent, invite disagreement before you commit, and name the real objective.

#LossAversion #DecisionMaking #BehaviouralEconomics

The availability heuristic is why one vivid story beats a year of clean data — your brain mistakes how easily something comes to mind for how often it’s actually true.

This is 1 of 52 biases in my book “Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself” — free on Kindle Unlimited: https://the3minutementor.com/books/ | Weekly essays: nigeldessau.substack.com

One bad hire from a particular university, one project that failed the last time you tried it, one customer who shouted loudest in the QBR — each of these gets weighted far above the data sitting in the deck, because it’s easier to recall. The availability heuristic doesn’t feel like bias from the inside. It feels like experience.

In this episode: why vividness beats frequency in your head, how meetings systematically reward the person with the best story rather than the best evidence, and the one question to ask before you let a memorable example override a number.

#AvailabilityHeuristic #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking

Confirmation bias is why smart people can believe almost anything — and why being clever makes it worse, not better. Intelligence doesn’t stop you from gathering evidence for the conclusion you already reached; it just makes you better at defending it.

Watch what happens when the evidence finally goes against you. You don’t drop the belief — you patch it. That’s ad hoc reasoning: a fresh explanation invented for each inconvenient fact, so the original claim survives untouched. Its cousin is special pleading — holding everyone else’s argument to a standard you quietly exempt your own from. Their project slipped because they’re disorganized; yours slipped because of circumstances. Each patch sounds reasonable on its own. Stacked up, they sound like a belief being protected rather than tested.

In this episode: what confirmation bias is actually protecting, how to hear ad hoc reasoning and special pleading in a meeting, and the one question that breaks the loop before a bad decision gets made.

More at the3minutementor.com | Substack: nigeldessau.substack.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nigeldessau

#ConfirmationBias #LogicalFallacies #DecisionMaking

Playing the victim doesn’t just distort how you see the world. It changes who’s willing to follow you.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Why “speaking truth to power” can sometimes become an excuse to stop questioning ourselves.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Admitting a mistake challenges our beliefs. Admitting someone else was right challenges our ego.

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

The cognitive biases that quietly transform whispers into certainty

You can find more content like this at https://nigeldessau.substack.com or on my website at https://the3minutementor.com.

Correlation is not causation — but your brain refuses to believe it. A famous graph shows that the number of Nicolas Cage films each year tracks almost perfectly with the number of people who drown in swimming pools. Cage didn’t drown anyone — yet your mind still sees a story in the pattern. That’s a spurious correlation, and it fools smart people every day.

In this episode, I use one ridiculous graph to show why we can’t resist turning coincidence into cause — the trap of confusing correlation vs causation — and what it means for the decisions you make at work.

Based on the book Convenient Truths: The Stories You Tell Yourself. More on the stories we tell ourselves at work: https://nigeldessau.substack.com and https://the3minutementor.com

#CorrelationVsCausation #CognitiveBias #DecisionMaking