Gleb Tsipursky: Practical De-Biasing Techniques for Agency Owners (Part 2)

Awareness is a starting point, not a solution. Part 1 of the Gleb Tsipursky conversation mapped the cognitive biases most likely to show up in agency decision-making: confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, availability bias, and overconfidence. Part 2 is the operational half, the specific techniques that research shows actually work to reduce the impact of these biases, translated from academic theory into practices that a real agency owner can run on a Tuesday afternoon.

Why Awareness Alone Isn't Enough

Here's the frustrating truth about cognitive biases: knowing they exist doesn't make you immune to them. Studies on confirmation bias consistently show that people who have been told about confirmation bias and understand it conceptually still demonstrate it in their subsequent judgments. The bias operates at a level below conscious reasoning. You can know it's happening and still not be able to stop it through willpower or good intentions.

What does work is structural. You have to build decision-making processes that force your reasoning to go places it wouldn't naturally go, to seek out disconfirming information, to stress-test your conclusions, to hear the strongest opposing argument. These aren't personality traits. They're techniques you can deploy deliberately, even when your gut is pulling in the opposite direction.

Gleb's work is valuable precisely because he doesn't stop at diagnosing the problem. He's practical about the interventions.

The Pre-Mortem Technique

The pre-mortem is the most immediately applicable technique in this conversation. Before finalizing a significant decision, a new hire, a marketing investment, a technology purchase, a strategic direction change, you run the following exercise: Assume it's twelve months from now, and the decision failed catastrophically. What went wrong?

Write down every plausible answer. Not the one you're most worried about, all of them. Then review the list and ask: are any of these failure modes something we could prevent with additional planning? Does this exercise reveal any information gaps we should fill before committing?

The magic of the pre-mortem is that it gives people psychological permission to voice concerns they would otherwise suppress. In a normal decision-making setting, expressing skepticism about a plan the team is excited about feels like a wet blanket. In a pre-mortem, skepticism is the assigned task. Everyone is trying to find ways it could go wrong. This surfaces the real concerns that confirmation bias buries.

Applied to agency decisions specifically: before you commit to a new staff hire, run a pre-mortem. "It's twelve months from now and this hire was a disaster. Why?" The answers will almost always include things like "we didn't have a real onboarding plan," "we didn't clarify the performance standard," or "we hired for personality and ignored the skill gap." These are fixable problems, but only if you surface them before the hire, not during the performance management conversation nine months later.

Structured Disagreement

One of the most effective organizational decision-making practices is the formalized use of a devil's advocate, someone whose explicit job in a decision conversation is to argue against the prevailing view. The key word is "explicit." Informally, most teams suppress dissent because disagreement feels disloyal. When disagreement is assigned as a role, the social dynamic shifts and the team gets access to information it would otherwise filter out.

Gleb is practical about how to do this in a small agency context. You don't need a committee. You need one person, could be a partner, a trusted advisor, a staff member you respect, whose job in a specific decision conversation is to make the strongest possible case against the path you're considering. Not to be difficult. To do the cognitive work that your confirmation bias won't let you do on your own.

The quality of the challenge matters. "I don't know if this is a good idea" is not useful structured disagreement. "The last three times we tried a similar marketing channel, the cost per acquisition was above our break-even point, and here's why this situation might be the same" is useful structured disagreement. You're looking for evidence-based counterarguments, not resistance.

The Information Audit

Before high-stakes decisions, Gleb recommends an explicit information audit: What information am I using to make this decision? Where did that information come from? What information might be relevant that I haven't looked for? Who would have a different perspective on this situation, and have I talked to them?

The last question is the most powerful. Agency owners tend to consult the same small circle of trusted peers for every significant decision. Those peers share similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar blind spots. They're valuable, and they're not a substitute for perspectives that come from genuinely different vantage points.

For a decision about hiring, the information audit might reveal that you haven't spoken to anyone who has actually managed the type of person you're about to hire. For a marketing decision, it might reveal that your data comes entirely from vendor-provided reports, and you haven't looked at third-party benchmarks or talked to agencies who tried the same channel and got different results.

The audit doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be honest.

Applying This to Your Next Big Decision

The next significant choice you're facing, whatever it is, take twenty minutes with these three tools before you decide. Run the pre-mortem in writing. Identify the strongest argument against your current leaning and force yourself to articulate it completely. Audit the information you're using and identify the most significant gap.

None of this guarantees a good outcome. Decision quality and outcome quality are not the same thing, good process can produce bad results through bad luck, and bad process can produce good results through good luck. What these techniques change is the expected value over time: better process produces better outcomes on average, across the full range of decisions you'll make in the next decade.

What This Means for Your Agency

The agency owners who build these practices into their regular decision-making, not just for crises but for routine choices, develop a different relationship with risk over time. They make fewer avoidable mistakes. They catch potential failures earlier. They build teams that feel safe raising concerns rather than deferring to the owner's gut.

That last point compounds. An agency where people feel safe disagreeing with the owner has access to far more relevant information than one where everyone defers. That information advantage shows up in better hiring, better strategy, and better client retention.

The Bottom Line

Gleb Tsipursky's disaster avoidance framework isn't about becoming a more cautious agency owner. It's about becoming a more accurate one. The pre-mortem, structured disagreement, and the information audit are tools for getting your decisions closer to reality, which, over the course of an agency's lifetime, is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make.

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Catch the full conversation:

• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Listen on Spotify
• Watch on YouTube

This is Part 2 of a 2-part conversation with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.

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