Dealing with Negativity Bias That Impacts Your Project Management

If you've never heard of negativity bias, it's a psychological term. It refers to the phenomenon in which people give negative experiences more psychological weight than positive ones. She went on to say that negative emotions have a three-fold stronger impact than positive emotions, according to research.

Consider how this might affect a project. Projects have plans, but as any project manager knows, those plans must be flexible enough to adapt to and change as issues arise. Things change and go wrong, and you begin to accumulate negative experiences, which can lead to a negativity bias. This can then infect the wisdom of a project manager.

How Negativity Bias Impacts Project Managers?

Here are a few examples of how negativity bias can hinder a project manager's ability to complete their tasks.

1.       Bad experiences taint data analysis, leading to the conclusion that things will go wrong again.

2.       Managing team members, particularly those who exhibit negative behavior, will have a negative impact on how you interact with the rest of the team.

3.       When communicating with stakeholders, it's common to hear or relate bad news, which can create a culture of expecting bad news.

5 Tips on Being Balanced

There are ways to strike a balance between optimism and cynicism. We recommend that you take the following advice:

1.       Surround yourself with positive people who can help you avoid falling into a negative spiral. While it will not eliminate all negative thoughts from your mind, it will provide you with a soundboard from which to see things more clearly.

2.       Having more positive experiences is another way to sway the scales in favor of a more realistic outlook on life. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, including listening to positive music, watching positive movies or videos, visiting positive locations, and consuming nurturing foods and beverages.

3.       Because it is always good and bad in any situation, you can reframe the situation by seeing the positive. It's all a matter of viewpoint. Of course, not everything can be viewed in a positive light, but most situations aren't as bad as they appear when viewed through the lens of negativity bias.

4.       Little rituals can assist you in moving on from a traumatic event. Try writing down all of the bad things that have happened to you or the project, then discarding or even burning the paper. Do whatever it takes to get it out of your system.

5.       Setting positive intentions and envisioning the project's positive outcome—truly visualizing that goal—can help you succeed. This does not eliminate negative experiences, but it does help to reduce the psychological impact.

Want to learn more tips on being balanced? Enrol in a PMP boot camp session today!