Author
Akarsh Sanghi
Akarsh Sanghi is an engineer & designer born and brought up in New Delhi, India. Previously he was leading the Growth & Card product teams at N26 Bank in Berlin until August 2019. Having joined the N26 team in the early days, he was responsible for the growth of the product across European & US markets. He also helped set up a new product and engineering hub for N26 in Barcelona and led the product teams to launch N26 You & N26 Metal. Before that he worked on special projects at The Studio - a new kind of an innovation studio set up in collaboration with IDEO & Zalando in Berlin. He holds a Master's degree from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. In early 2020 he co-founded his own company with Udit Gupta and raised initial seed capital from Y Combinator.
Sociable's Podcast
Brains Byte Back interviews startups, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders that tap into how our brains work. We explore how knowledge & technology intersect to build a better, more sustainable future for humanity. If you’re interested in ideas that push the needle, and future-proofing yourself for the new information age, join us every Friday. Brains Byte Back guests include founders, CEOs, and other influential individuals making a big difference in society, with past guest speakers such as New York Times journalists, MIT Professors, and C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies.
The ostrich effect explains why some of the smartest founders ignore bad news until it's too late. In this episode of Brains Byte Back, host Erick Espinosa sits down with Dr. Atif Ansar, an Oxford researcher and co-founder of Foresight, to break down the psychological bias that makes teams bury uncomfortable information and keep dashboards green long after a project has drifted off course.
Dr. Ansar has spent years studying thousands of the world's largest projects, from dams and railways to today's AI data center boom. He explains why optimism bias hits founders and entrepreneurs harder than anyone, why a project gets more dangerous the closer it looks to ”done,” and how a little self-deception quietly turns small delays into major failures.
You'll learn:
What the ostrich effect is and the behavioral science behind it (Kahneman, Tversky, and Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Why organizations can be even more irrational than the individuals inside them
How to establish an honest baseline with emotional neutrality, without guilt or blame
Why you should question the ”green” metrics and support the ”red” ones
The final 10% problem, and why heroic delivery fails
Whether you're running a company, a startup, or a side project, this conversation is a practical guide to beating the optimism bias that sabotages your goals and to learning how to look at your numbers before they look at you.
🎧 Listen now
Find out more about Dr. Atif Ansar.
Learn more about https://www.foresight.works/
Reach out to today's host Erick Espinosa – [email protected]
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