Debiasing Your Software Design Decision-Making

We’ve all been there: a design meeting where a solution feels intuitively right, an 'obvious' path forward. But what if that gut feeling is actually a cognitive bias in disguise? The human mind is a powerful tool, but it's also prone to systematic errors that can lead to fragile architectures, technical debt, and costly rework. Biases like the anchoring effect, where we get stuck on the first idea, or the sunk cost fallacy, which keeps us tied to failing projects, are not abstract concepts—they are design flaws in our own decision-making process.

This talk will explore how the latest research in behavioral economics can be directly applied to the world of software architecture. We'll move beyond simply being aware of biases and introduce a practical, five-step checklist designed to systematically 'debias' your design choices.

You will learn to:
> Be Decision-Ready: Learn to recognize when you and your team are in the right state to make critical decisions, avoiding biases that arise from fatigue, emotional states, or a lack of necessary skills.
> Broaden the Frame: Combat additive bias and functional fixedness by intentionally exploring a wider range of solutions—including options that remove complexity—to avoid getting stuck on a single idea.
> Seek Independent Advice: Move past overconfidence and the false-consensus effect by actively soliciting diverse perspectives and taking an "outside view" on how similar challenges have been solved or failed in the past.
> Test Your Assumptions: Inoculate your team against loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy by running a pre-mortem and finding a devil’s advocate, preparing for potential failure before it even happens.
> Establish Simple Rules: Avoid the law of triviality and the availability bias by creating objective, repeatable criteria that guide your choices and help you focus on what truly matters.

Join us to learn how to move from a reactive, bias-driven design process to a deliberate, resilient, and ultimately more effective one. By applying this checklist, you’ll not only build better software—you’ll build a better decision-making habit.