What we don’t know, is often what holds us back, Tim Hughes

I was reading the Financial Times on Saturday and came across a great piece by Gillian Tett

The article was about starting the new year with different thinking and was aptly titled “Why we should know what we don’t know.”

Tett references a manual published by the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) on cognitive blind spots

One line really stood out: “Many people have little to no knowledge of how human thinking works.”

Now, most people reading this will already accept that we all have biases

We carry them into every internal meeting, every supplier conversation, and even into every article we read

The problem isn’t that biases exist, it’s that we rarely challenge them

The FIS manual outlines 18 different cognitive biases that hamper effective thinking, including:

Groupthink – sticking with the cosy assumptions of our tribe
Anchoring – over-relying on the first piece of information we see
Confirmation bias – only noticing data that supports what we already believe
Mirror imaging – assuming others think the way we do
Absence of evidence bias – failing to question the data we don’t have

Over the decade that Adam and I have been running DLA Ignite, we’ve seen these biases play out repeatedly

A common one is how organisations justify continuing with cold calling, even when there’s clear data showing more effective and efficient ways to create pipeline, our social selling methodology being a prime example

The question we often ask ourselves is: why are people holding their own companies back like this?

One organisation recently told us their cold-calling challenges were down to “market conditions.” For three consecutive quarters, we explained how we could help them adapt

In the end, instead of changing approach, they shut down all non-US operations

That’s not a market problem. That’s a thinking problem

As we move into 2026, I genuinely hope more leaders lean into new thinking and revisit Carol Dweck’s Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset theory

How we approach uncertainty, evidence, and change will define outcomes far more than the tools we use

One comment really stuck with me from someone who attended one of our pre-Christmas webinars:
“It’s the first session on social media where the key driver was clearly pipeline and revenue. Until then, social had always felt like fluff. It was also the first session that was backed by hard data.”