In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle breaks down how this mental shortcut shows up, why it’s especially risky when “it matters more,” and how shifting to sequence over strategy keeps you from falling into the trap.
Ever notice how the last thing you saw or heard suddenly feels like the best idea? That’s the availability bias at work, and it can quietly steer your business decisions in the wrong direction. In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle breaks down how this mental shortcut shows up, why it’s especially risky when “it matters more,” and how shifting to sequence over strategy keeps you from falling into the trap. With clear, relatable examples, Michelle shows you how to think beyond what’s easiest and start making choices that actually move your business forward.
Resources
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years that I've been doing this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
The Theme: It Matters More
If you've been listening to season two since we've gotten started, you know that we've been following a theme. I've been following a theme. And that theme is it matters more.
What does that mean and why am I following it? What it means is that right now when budgets may be tight, people may be feeling a little bit of fear about investment, about moving forward with what you might be selling them. Well, it matters more that you do a good job. You don't have as much room to be sloppy or to be inefficient or to not be precise with your inputs.
Unfair Advantages Explained
And so everything, every action that you take with your business right now, well, it matters more that it's thought through and that you get it right. Because in times when people aren't thinking as hard or budgets are loose, they'll buy anything. In times where that doesn't happen, you need to step up because they're probably going to have more questions and they're going to be a little bit more reluctant to buy.
So this season is all about these little things that matter more and that can give you that edge over your competition, give you that edge as you continue to grow your business. We have different pillars for it matters more. And today we're going to tackle something under my personal favorite matters more pillar, which is unfair advantages.
The Availability Bias
And what I mean by unfair advantages is that these are things or something that when you understand or are aware of them, it gives you an advantage that the vast majority of other business owners or of your competition aren't aware of. And so when you're aware of it, you get an unfair advantage because you are able to act on that. You're able to do a little bit of a better job.
You're able to maybe see a red flag and adjust a little bit faster than anyone else. And so you get a little bit of that first mover advantage. And this is a little bit different than a traditional business school definition.
That's a little bit more technical, so we're not going to get into that. But just know that when I talk about unfair advantages and when I talk about the unfair advantage pillar within it matters more, I am talking about the fact that you know how to think and approach things a little bit differently, and dare I say a little bit better than others, and that gives you an advantage. If you are taking the same actions, if you are offering the same thing as someone else, but you understand these different topics we cover under unfair advantages, well, you're going to have the lead in the race, if you will.
You're going to have an advantage of them. And the unfair advantage that I want to talk about today is a decision-making one. And this is the availability, heuristic, bias, whatever you want to talk about it.
It's a decision-making bias. And if you're familiar with these, they are all fascinating. We have the confirmation bias, we have survivorship bias, which I've done an episode about in Season 1, and today I want to talk about the availability bias.
Everyday Examples of the Bias
Before I get into it, let's get the definition out of the way. The availability bias is just a cognitive bias that just means that it's a way your brain thinks that is not entirely rational. So it's a cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision.
So that's the business school definition. Again, cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on an example, information, or recent experience that is readily available to you, even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision. What does that mean in English? In English, that means things that you can easily or frequently see are going to play a big role in your decisions.
They're going to be a bias in your decisions. They're going to weigh more heavily than things that you can't see. And this is not shocking information.
It's very obvious, as most cognitive biases are. For example, if I see a beautiful bouquet at the farmer's market and then someone asks me what my favorite flower is, I am probably going to reply with the name of a flower that was in that bouquet, right? And I'm going to do that because I just saw it and it was beautiful. It's top of my mind.
It's available. But it's also probably not my favorite, right? I probably have a different favorite flower unless my favorite flower just happens to be in season and happens to be at the market that day. But it's harder to access that in the moment when someone's asking me, what's your favorite flower? And I just saw something 30 minutes ago that's good enough.
I will answer that. And it's the same thing for, like, your favorite food, your favorite vacation spot. I don't know about you, but my favorite vacation spot is usually the last place I've been because I'm feeling overly inspired by it and excited by the memories that are easily accessible, that are available, right? Or maybe it's somewhere I've been frequently, something where it's really available.
My favorite food is probably a favorite that I had that week, not a favorite that I haven't had for six months or a restaurant that I haven't been to for six months because that's just harder to pull up. And so this is really normal, the availability bias, as, again, all biases, super, super normal. But that is also the problem because there are so many things processing in our brains at any given time that even though, like, we stopped and thought about it, we would realize what we were doing and that we were invoking a bias, we don't stop and think about it.
We just kind of motor on, grab the available information, and hope for the best. And the problem is that most of the time that's no big deal. It is not going to be a big deal if I tell you that my favorite flower is not actually my favorite flower.
I mean, maybe you go out and buy me that flower thinking it's my favorite, and so I don't get my perfectly favorite flower when you show back up with flowers for me. How many times can I say flowers right now? But you get it. Like, this is not a big crisis.
Why It Matters More in Business
So usually the availability heuristic in your everyday life is not necessarily a big deal. But, you're not going to be surprised to hear me say this, when it matters more, it becomes a big deal. Right? Because the problem is grabbing that available information instead of complete information, it might be normal, but it can also set us up for failure.
I mean, failure is a big word, but it can definitely set us up for frustration, wasted time, and inefficiency. Again, we'll go to the simple example. If I'm at the farmer's market, and you ask me what my favorite flower is, and I say the prettiest flower I saw that day, but it's really in like my lowest 50% of favorite flowers, and then you start buying me bouquets of that for the rest of my life, I'm probably going to be a little frustrated.
I'm going to have to tell you that that's not actually my favorite. So that is a very low stakes example of when the availability heuristic can set you up for failure, inefficiency, wasted time, or maybe what we would call unwanted time that you have to put into a conversation correcting it. Right? Maybe you have a friend who's always suggesting a restaurant that you brought up one time because it was at the top of your mind, but it's not really your favorite.
These are all everyday times when the availability heuristic sets you up for, again, failure. Like I'm being dramatic with that, but it's setting you up for failure, frustration, wasted time, having to correct people, all of that stuff. It's annoying, but it doesn't, you know, actually it's not life or death.
But if you're a business owner, particularly a business owner in times when it matters more, it can matter a lot. So let's go ahead and dig into some of the easy ways that you can set yourself up to not fall prey to the availability heuristic, especially with your business, and in doing so, grab yourself an unfair advantage because that's what we want to do, right? Ultimately, we want to think through how you can, how the knowledge of these things helps you get an unfair advantage so that as you're doing things a little bit better, like five, 10% better than other people, really matter in times when it matters more. So let's get into how you think through this in a way that doesn't just require you to have willpower or to have discipline because that's just not practical.
How Sequence Helps Avoid Bias
Beating the availability bias is, in the end, big surprise, a great job for our friend sequence over strategy, right? Imagine that. Imagine I'm bringing you an example of something that sequence over strategy does a really good job of fighting. And why it does is because when we're focused on strategy, so when we're going in the wrong order, when we're focused on strategy first, you can now see, we lean towards what we can see.
So when I'm always talking to you about how I don't want you throwing spaghetti against the wall when you're choosing a strategy, right? I don't just want you looking around. I literally say that all the time. I don't want you looking around and saying, oh, they're doing that.
It appears to be looking good. Why don't I try that? That's an example of throwing spaghetti against the wall because you're just picking a strategy based on what you see. But based on this episode, you can now obviously see how that is you falling prey to availability bias, right? If you are looking around, if you have a struggle in your business and you're trying to figure out how to solve it, and the first thing that you do in order to figure out how to solve it is to look around and see what other people are doing, you are immediately limiting yourself and you are immediately just dropping straight into availability bias because you're just going to see what you can see and you're going to choose something out of that.
But that's not what we want to do. I mean, sometimes you might get lucky, but oftentimes it's not going to work. And one of the reasons it's not going to work, as we know through a lot of the conversations we've had about relationship or traffic marketing, is that there tends to be a lot of strategies that you can't even see.
And so when you're just looking around and saying, oh, I'll try one of these, well, you're limiting yourself because you can't see everything. So this is when we talk about sequence over strategy and how starting at that kind of fifth Y, right? We always talk about the five Ys and getting to the root cause of something. If we start at that fifth Y, if we center sequence over strategy, we can beat the availability bias without ever having to really think about it, right? And this is one of the benefits of going in that right order.
You end up accounting for many of the common decision-making pitfalls, not only the availability bias, but also survivorship bias, confirmation bias, all of those things. When you sit there and remember to go through sequence over strategy instead of sitting there and saying, oh gosh, I need to knock out all of these different decision-making heuristics one by one that's going to take forever, right? So if you're starting your thought process at the root cause, you're following sequence over strategy, you're accounting for all of these little traps that over time can add up into real problems. Again, you know, one time you do this, it's probably not a big deal, but over time they really add up and become a problem.
Using Visual Tools to Stay on Track
And when it matters more, they certainly do become a problem there. And this, by the way, is why I use so many visual diagnostics. So if you come to any of my live events, if you've interacted with me, if you've come to my bootcamp, you always see me bringing up continuums or dials, and we'll talk about those in a second, but you see me bringing up visual representations of an entire spectrum or an entire continuum of options for you.
And that's done for a reason. I mean, number one, it's just easier to see things visually, but what it's really being done is to make sure that you are not just looking at the options that are right in front of you, and instead we're looking at a visual representation of all the options that might exist so that you remember to start at that anchor spot, start at that root cause, and make your decision from there and not just make your decision from everything under the sun. You have probably seen this.
A couple of very typical examples that you will see in all of my material are the business dials. So when I'm talking about business model design, you will hear me say that in order to have a stable and sustainable business that's growing at a stable pace, you need to make sure that your customer niche, your marketing mix, and your product mix are all in alignment with each other. And I think of those as dials, right? So it's three individual dials, and you want those things to be working together.
You want them in alignment with each other. Sometimes I think about this as a washing machine. Those dials, like on a washing machine, if you're doing delicate, you probably want it on cold.
You don't want it on super hot. Or if you are washing your dog's muddy towels, you probably want that on super hot, right? We want these dials aligned. And so that's the same thing with the customer niche and the marketing mix and the product mix.
That's why I'm always talking about those dials, and I'm pulling those dials up, and I even show them as continuum sometimes in terms of what is one side of the customer niche, what's the other side? What's one side of the marketing mix, what's the other side? What's one side of a product mix, what's the other side of it? And we can visually see those alignments. And we're doing that so that you see the entire continuum, the entire dial in front of you. I'm showing you the entire product mix that it starts on one end with completely custom and bespoke work, and on the other end, it's completely passive products, and there's a whole bunch in between, right? But we're looking at the entire continuum of what a product mix might be instead of just looking around and seeing what might be available to you.
The other very obvious way that I use this all the time is the marketing continuum that I'm constantly getting out when I'm talking to you about relationship and traffic marketing, right? I show you that blue line, and I say on the left side of this line are all the marketing strategies that encompass relationship marketing. On the right side are all the strategies that encompass traffic marketing. And I do that for a really specific reason.
Number one, again, it's easy to see it visually, but number two, relationship marketing strategies, which if you're a service provider, most of you should be using, are very hard to see. If you are looking around in the world, you are going to see traffic marketing strategies, and this is at the heart of why so many people get stuck in traffic marketing patterns that they don't break out of, and they don't understand how to break out of, or they don't even understand that they're maybe doing something that is not to their best benefit. It's because the availability heuristic, the availability bias is in there, and when they say, how should I be marketing? They look around at what they can see, and what they can see are social media posts.
What they can see are emails being sent out. They can see traffic marketing. They don't see relationship marketing, because relationship marketing mostly happens behind the scenes in individual conversations, whether that is a virtual conversation, an in-person conversation, a digital conversation where you're just chatting over text or email or something, but these happen behind closed doors, not because they want to be hidden, but just because it's a relationship, right, that's not being played out publicly, and so the heart of why people screw up and don't even know that relationship marketing exists, that's the availability bias at play right there, because you don't see it, and so when you say, oh, I need to market, you automatically think and see traffic strategies.
When there is a whole half of the marketing world available to you that are actually relationship strategies, and those, again, if you're a service provider, are probably the ones that you should be using. So that, again, is why I am always going back in a sequence over strategy method and saying, like, let's not pick the strategy first. Let's go back, look at the continuums again, and if you hang out with me, you know that we look at those a painful amount.
I pull them out every single time I'm with you, and that is to remind you that these things exist. We start with that conversation. We start with where should you be on this continuum? If we're looking at the product mix continuum that's between bespoke and, you know, the product that is completely passive, where do you land on that? Where do you land on that continuum? Or, again, you know, if we're in marketing, where do you land on relationship versus traffic? And when we know where you land on that, then we can start looking around for the strategies because we've asked the most important question first of, hey, where are you in alignment on this continuum? Because when you don't ask that question, that, again, is when you fall into availability bias and you're just picking whatever.
You're just picking whatever, and we don't want you to do that because it doesn't make any sense.
Marketing Example in Practice
Let's run through a really quick example. None of this is going to sound unfamiliar or new to you, but now that we know the availability biases out there, I just want to run through a really simple, again, marketing strategy so you can see how this plays out and you can start to catch yourself and you can commit to that sequence over strategy because when you ask that question, when you go back to the foundation every time and say, where am I on the continuum? You know, what is the world of my possibilities? That's when you are going to take care of not only the availability bias, but a lot of the other ones as well.
So common marketing example, right? We've probably talked through this one a hundred times, but now again, we're going to be doing it through the lens of the availability bias and just showing how you can make sure you don't fall prey to it by going through this process. So very often, people will come to me and they will say, hey, I started my business with referrals. I reached out to family and friends.
It's been fantastic. I love all my referral business, but I'm not comfortable with how I'm not in charge of it. I want to do some marketing where I'm not just sitting back and hoping a referral comes in.
Very understandable. You should do that. And then their next statement is, and so I need to start marketing.
And when I ask them what that means, what they mean is traffic marketing. What they mean is they feel like they need to go start posting on social media and doing all of these things. And again, right there, there's the availability bias right in front of us.
Because if you think about that relationship versus traffic continuum, what did they just do? What they just did was they are on the extreme relationship side, right? They're relying on referrals, which is our most extreme form of relationship marketing. And then they decide they need to go market. And so now they overcorrect because they can't see it.
They skip the entire left side of that continuum. They skip 50% of their available strategies that are relationship strategies. They skip over that and they completely overcorrect onto the traffic side.
Because when they say I need to go market, what they can see are traffic strategies. And so that's where they naturally go if they don't have their continuum in front of them, reminding them or even educating them that it exists in the first place, that there are all these things that they can do on the relationship side that are actually marketing strategies. They're just not public.
And that's a much more natural evolution, right? If you are relying on referrals, it is unnatural. It is a huge leap to go from referrals to traffic. But it's not so much of a leap and it's much more effective to take some baby steps onto that left side of the continuum.
So let's back up there. When you start with the strategies, right, when you're doing what most people do when they come to me and they're saying I've been relying on referrals so now I'm going to start quote unquote marketing, what they're actually doing is they're starting with the strategies. And therefore they land with traffic strategies and they have fallen prey to the availability bias.
If I get them in time or usually what happens is afterwards I hear this story and I say, oh, we need to start with the continuum and figure out where your business is actually in alignment. And nine times out of 10, if they're a service provider, we discover that they are in alignment with the relationship side of things. And therefore we can have a more productive conversation then about how to fill in relationship marketing strategies and we don't waste time over correcting to the traffic side.
Wrapping It All Up
And right then, just by asking that sequence over strategy question and just by going in the right order, you don't have to physically say to yourself, okay, how can I make sure I'm not falling prey to availability or survivorship or confirmation or all these biases that come in because you built it in. And then in a world where it matters more, to bring it all the way back to the start, right, in a world where that matters more, now you have successfully done a better job than most of your peers who are going to fall prey to that problem. They are going to fall prey and they are going to go over in traffic market.
You're not going to do that and so you're going to do a little bit better and therefore you're going to be a little bit more successful in a world where there is not as much room for inefficiency and for mistakes. And that's why we want to take the time to go in this right order because again, it's just going to save you time in the long run if you can skip as many of these mistakes as possible. So, to summarize with that, my friends, biases are all around us.
These are all the decision-making heuristics. I think there's like, who knows how many have been defined. I think a standard number is about 50 of them.
All these very common traps that you can fall into. And most of the time, again, in real life, they're not a big deal. You know, like this farmer's market example I was sharing of, you know, your preferred flower.
Like, we'll get over it. And if you have to have a little bit of time to have a little bit of a conversation with someone because they keep bringing you the wrong flower because you use the availability bias to tell them what your favorite flower was, like, everyone's going to survive that. That is not that big of a deal.
But sometimes it is a big deal. And that's when you need to be aware of this because when you're running a business, when you're trying to grow a business, you know, especially again in times where it might matter more, in times where people are a little nervous, knowing these things and not wasting time making the wrong decisions, but instead keeping yourself on the correct track as best you can, it's going to help. And it's going to do more than help.
It is going to give you that unfair advantage that's going to allow you to keep moving forward and frankly stay ahead of folks who don't have that advantage. So we want you to do that. And that's why I am going to endlessly talk about this, even if you hear those similar examples over and over and over again, because it's so important to train your brain to get into that sequence over strategy mode.
So with that, my friends, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you would share it with someone else that might help. Or if you'd leave a review, that really helps us reach other folks who have such kind reviews.
I appreciate all of you so much who have taken the time to leave a review. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And in the meantime, remember to head over to themichellewarner.com, jump on my newsletter list.
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