Common Logical Fallacies
As a leader, setting clear direction for your team to follow is a large part of your role. And while teams often assume that there is a tried-and-true playbook in your head, the reality is much of the time your direction stems from logic and first-principles.
When logic is your day job, you need to be wary of any bias or assumptions that could influence your thinking.
There are plenty of tools you could use to build and check for logic in the business world – dot dashes, logic trees, assigning devil’s advocates. We will cover those some other time.
Today’s focus is not building logic, but identifying common flaws in logic, a.k.a. logical fallacies. The more you are familiar with these fallacies, the more likely you will be to spot them in your own thinking.
There are plenty of logical fallacies that could be covered, but to keep this piece manageable I’ll focus on 4 that I regularly see negatively impacting decisions in the business world:
The Straw Man / Straw Model Fallacy
The Bandwagon Fallacy
The Slippery Slope Fallacy
The Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy
The Straw Model Fallacy
Ironically, straw model is a term that consultants use daily to mean ‘a draft of an idea that hasn’t been fully defined’. Building simplified versions of ideas or concepts can be an extremely useful communications tool.
The Straw Model Fallacy isn’t that. This fallacy is when an individual simplifies an idea down to an absurd level, and then uses that simplified interpretation to discredit it.
The Bandwagon Fallacy
The Bandwagon Fallacy is exactly as it sounds. Assuming an idea has merit, based strictly on the fact that others appear to believe it does.
In mature industries, sometimes this fallacy accounts for the majority of an organization’s product roadmap or innovation pipeline.
The Slippery Slope Fallacy
This fallacy is where one party challenges an idea by arguing that the chain of events it will cause will come with unintended negative consequences.
I’ve seen this argument used to avoid investment in innovation – especially if it’s a new business unit or channel that a group is looking to stand-up.
It’s also the fallacy du jour on social media in 2021.
The Anecdotal Evidence Fallacy
This is bar-none the most frequently used fallacy that I see in every corner of every organization.
Using individual experience as the driving force behind strategic decision-making can be an unavoidable temptation. Whenever possible, you need to avoid it. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with individual experience as the inspiration for a line of reasoning, but if it isn’t validated by evidence you are making decisions with a sample size of one.
Nobody is a flawless logician; bias and fallacy are going to sneak into your decision-making every once in a while.
However, the more you’re aware of these common trip wires, the more likely you will be to catch yourself before you go too far down the wrong path.
If you don’t share this post, it means you basically hate me (straw model), because everybody is doing it (bandwagon), and not sharing this one means you’ll probably never share a post again (slippery slope); trust me, I’ve seen it happen before (anecdotal):
