Communication Excellence in Project Management

An exercise that I use in my project management communication course is to have the students pick a cognitive bias from the Wikipedia list of cognitive biases. I have the student explain the cognitive bias and then ask how they could spot this cognitive bias in someone else. Then, I ask the student to explain how to neutralize the cognitive bias so that the student can communicate effectively despite the cognitive bias.

For example, imagine that a project sponsor has the “planning fallacy” cognitive bias. So, when communicating project deadlines to this sponsor, how does a student give a realistic estimate without the sponsor pushing for more optimistic (and difficult to achieve) deadlines? I have the student roleplay various communication strategies and have the other students critique the strategies. I believe it is a great learning experience for future project managers.

How do you deal with cognitive biases? Not only with stakeholders and project team members but your cognitive biases? Are you teaching your project team members to recognize and work around their cognitive biases when communicating?