"Everything happens for a reason. It is what it is. Whatever will be, will be. Accidents happen."

Sound familiar? They're all common, everyday variations of Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." If you're like most people, you probably drop plenty of phrases like these in casual conversation without thinking much about them.

But let's think about them.

Murphy's Law actually says a lot more about your subjective mental state than  your objective situation. It's a way to cope with a very human feeling that, like most people, you hate admitting in yourself as much as you perhaps enjoy celebrating in others: blame. Blame hurts, and that can trigger your instinct to deny facts and rewrite your history

The term "cognitive bias" refers to a family of such coping mechanisms, which are illogical tendencies to custom-tailor reality to better suit your ego. This particular flavor of cognitive bias, claiming personal credit for your successes while attributing your failures to factors beyond your control, is called the self-serving bias. By filtering out inconvenient truths, your self-serving bias helps you to artificially elevate your self-esteem, which, by avoiding the pain of blame for a failure and/or triggering the ego boost that goes with claiming credit for a success, reinforces your biased behavior.

Part of your self-preservation mechanism, your brain is wired to try to control your future, or at least to anticipate and prepare you for it. Therein lies the psychological difference between a promise and a prediction. Your promises commit you to outcomes while your predictions merely involve you in events. A particularly stressful complex of feelings and behaviors, blame happens when things don't turn out as you said they would.

Looking back on a disappointment, did you promise that outcome? Or did you just predict it? Cop to the former and, ouch! You take the blame. On the other hand, if you can somehow pretend to the latter, you can deflect the blame onto your imaginary friend "Murphy."

You learned this as a school child when you promised your English teacher you'd hand her an essay on Friday morning but, OMG! Unpredictably, your dog ate the only copy Thursday night. Can she please give you the weekend to write it again? What did your English teacher teach you when she said Yes?

You grew up and got better at it. One day, as a sales manager, you painted two pretty pictures of the future for your boss: 1) sales for the fourth quarter will be up 15% over last year; and 2) you'll organize the year-end company picnic, which will be held on June 30. 

The sun shone bright on the picnic that June 30, but Q4 sales were down 6% from last year. Those blown figures? Well, considering the thin support you got from Marketing,  the crappy product design, and a lousy economy, you and your team actually rescued the company by limiting the decline to just 6%. And, hey! Didn't you pick the perfect day for the company picnic?

Questions

• How did the boss hurt herself by glossing over or consoling you on the disappointing sales figures and congratulating you on the sunshine at the picnic? Why might she have done that?
• Is a "forecast" a promise or a commitment? What's the difference between a weather forecast and a sales forecast? What are the management implications of this difference?
• What happens within an organization when management obviously allows some people, but not others, to get away with their self-serving bias?
• How might a self-serving bias affect a company's security systems and business processes?
• What effect might the self-serving bias, in one or both parties, have on a bilateral negotiation?