When I was in college, I used to abhor collaborating with students who were less structured than I was.
How could they be so chaotic, I wondered. I would ask them to fill out the most elaborate spreadsheets to keep track of joint projects, and I would get terribly annoyed if they didn’t – which was most of the time.
As you might guess, I wasn’t a particularly pleasant person to work with in those days.
That’s because I made a critical cognitive error:
I assumed that my way of thinking and working was the norm others should live up to.
“This level of structure works for me,” I thought, “so it must work for everyone.”
What I failed to see was that not everyone’s brain lights up with excitement when a spreadsheet dictates what they should be doing on Tuesday afternoon.
In hindsight, I fell into the trap of what social psychologists refer to as the false consensus effect:
We tend to assume that others share our beliefs, preferences, and ways of doing things, even when they don’t.
The false consensus effect is a very common and deeply human bias. No one is immune to it.
But when leaders in organisations unconsciously treat their own ways of working as the standard for others, the effect can be especially insidious.
Their personal preferences become the unspoken norm that everyone feels pressured to live up to, creating the illusion of consensus. And it’s those who think and work differently from the norm who feel the consequences the most.
The invisible frame of reference
What makes the false consensus effect so tricky is that leaders, like all of us, are often unaware of it.
To them, certain behaviours may feel like “just the way we do things in this team or organisation,” without realising that what feels normal or obvious to them is shaped by their own cognitive style and preferences.
They may also be oblivious to how these norms affect or even exclude others. Not because of ill intentions, but simply because it’s incredibly hard to look beyond our own frame of reference.
I once spoke to a leader who used to constantly message his team throughout the day as new ideas came to him. For him, it felt like a natural way of staying connected. He never thought twice about it. “It works for me, so it must work for my team,” he assumed.
But in reality, some of his team members were struggling with the daily barrage of pings and notifications. They needed uninterrupted focus time for deep work. Because they knew a new request from their leader could arrive at any moment, they ended up working in a constant state of fractured attention.
When we say ‘we’, who are we really referring to?
The same kind of bias can play out on a wider organisational level.
“We work best when we’re together in person,” is one of the most-used arguments for companies mandating a return to the office. It’s also a classic case of the false consensus effect in action.
The problem with this statement is that, in the absence of supporting data, it frames a leadership belief or preference as a fact.
For leaders who climbed the corporate ladder through in-person collaboration and networking, it seems like a universal truth, because it’s true for them.
What it fails to recognise is that for some people, especially those who are neurodivergent, their subjective reality can be very different.
Daily in-office collaboration might leave them exhausted because they constantly have to battle sensory distractions or navigate unwritten social rules.
They might be much more effective collaborating remotely, where they have more control over their surroundings without having to mask as much.
It’s not that leaders actively seek to dismiss those experiences. The cost of constant in-person collaboration may simply be invisible to them because they don’t experience it themselves.
The case for cultivating cognitive humility
Because the false consensus effect operates subconsciously, becoming aware of it is the first step to counteracting it.
What I had to learn as a structure-loving person is that my preference for structure is just that: a preference. It’s not the only way of getting things done. Nor is it always the best one. Sometimes, I must admit, the magic in life really does happen outside spreadsheets.
I like to think of it as cognitive humility: the ability to recognise that we see and experience the world through a particular lens. We can never fully take off this lens. But what we can do is acknowledge its limits, and stay open to the possibility that others see and experience the world very differently from us.
In fact, I’ve found that a simple way to counteract the false consensus effect is to assume that others don’t think or work the same way we do.
Rather than jumping straight into a collaboration, it helps to take some time to explore each other’s cognitive style and work preferences first. What level of structure works for the other person? How do they prefer to communicate? What kind of environment helps them do their best work?
The leader who used to ping his team throughout the day eventually took the time to understand how his behaviour was affecting others. By having an open conversation with his team, he came to realise that his default way of communicating was actually keeping them constantly on edge.
Now he batches his ideas twice a day, and he clearly flags which messages require action. He became a more effective leader by recognising that what he thought worked for everyone was in fact a false consensus, rooted in his own preferred way of working.
And for the leaders who continue to suggest that “we work best together in person”? Perhaps pausing to ask who is left out of that “we” might be the ultimate act of cognitive humility.
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