The extent of the optimism bias is thus measured empirically by recording an organisation’s expectations before a project event unfolds and contrasting those with the required outcomes and forecast benefits that transpire since reality sometimes does not meet customer expectations.
#Optimism images full#
This denotes the glass half full or half empty conundrum. If expectations are better than reality, the bias is optimistic if reality is better than expected, the bias is pessimistic. This optimism bias is defined as the difference between a person's expectation and the outcome that follows. Such faith helps to motivate people directing, managing and delivering a project or programme to pursue organisational (including strategic) objectives and key results. This innate confidence or attitude that something is the case is articulated by Tali Sharot of TedTalk fame, where she states that we are more optimistic than realistic. To enable progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities – better ones – and we need to believe that we can achieve them. It's the tendency for project portfolio management professionals to ignore lessons learned and believe that they are less likely to repeat the same mistakes or experience negative events than others and to act on that optimistic belief that “It won't happen to me!” This thinking often leads to a phenomenon called the planning fallacy in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the actual time needed.
The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as optimism bias.
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