Everyone has experienced the feeling of a planned route going terribly wrong. You set a plan, get on the road, and then bam! You crash into an accident. Your GPS starts changing your route. But what do you do? You may think, “I hope it clears soon”, or “I don’t want to change my route.” You don’t want to change your route, and you’re going to stick to the plan, even thougheven though your arrival time has increased.
This isn’t some stubbornness. This is the dispatch bias. The powerful cognitive phenomenon sticks with us during our drive to work every day and is also with us in our jobs, management, and even our personal lives.
The dispatch bias is sticking with us, and whether we notice it or not, we make a bad decision and ignore the other options available to us. Once we dispatch the call, we create a plan and set an intention; we want to stick to it no matter what, even if the evidence says otherwise.
This article explains how to use mental flaws to your advantage. It explains the dispatch bias, what it is, how to use it, and how to deal with it. We will learn how to make better decisions instead of getting stuck on our first move.
Table of Contents
1. What Exactly Is The Dispatch Bias?
Research on operational decisions and the dispatch bias stems from emergency services, taxi dispatch, and logistics. Think of the 911 call center operators. They receive a call, conduct a case assessment, and dispatch a police car and an ambulance to a specific location. After a few moments, additional and more precise information arrives: the incident is two blocks to the north. Logically, they should be updating the units, but studies have shown that instead of adjusting the units, they keep the original dispatch. Generally, the first response will “figure it out” on the way. There is a mental cost to changing plans and adjusting shifts, so it’s more reasonable to stick with the first dispatch.
This instinct scales. At its core, the dispatch bias is a dangerous blend of several cognitive errors:
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: “We’ve already started, so we must continue.”
- Status Quo Bias: Changing the plan feels more effortful and risky than sticking with it.
- Ego Protection: Reversing a decision can feel like admitting a mistake, threatening our competence.
It’s the point where planning meets action, and our brain’s desire for consistency overrides its capacity for reason. Understanding this trap is the first step to escaping it.
2. The Mental Machinery: Why Our Brains Get Stuck
Our brains are efficiency engines, not always truth-seeking machines. Committing to a decision, like dispatching a resource, triggers a psychological shift. The mental energy moves from deliberation to implementation. Creating a new “mental model” for a revised plan is cognitively expensive. The dispatch bias exploits this laziness.
Furthermore, in professional settings, decisiveness is often rewarded, while perceived indecision or “flip-flopping” is penalized. This social reinforcement reinforces the dispatch bias, leading leaders to double down on failing strategies to project confidence. We confuse steadfastness with strength, even when the ground is shifting beneath our feet.
3. 7 Important Areas Where The Dispatch Bias Has Negative Effects
Business And Project Management
After several months of hard work, a company brings Product X to market, but initial feedback is lukewarm. The team may have to pivot to avoid market failure, but because they have “dispatched” the product, in other words, sequenced and scheduled the budget and team to spend it, they ignore feedback. Marketing spends a blast on the product, hoping to tip the market. This version of the dispatch bias has burned hundreds of products and wasted millions of capital. There are not many lost causes in a product; it is the team’s inability to diverge and recalibrate the mission.
Technology And Software Development
During a software sprint, a team decides to build a given scope of features. In the middle of it, user testing drives a key UX or priority user need gap. The pull of pragmatism to finish the feature leads the team to put a bow on a perfectly crafted, yet misaligned, result. The dispatch bias manifests as a commitment to finish this feature. It creates a bow of technical waste and lost opportunity.
Healthcare Diagnostics & Treatment
A doctor diagnoses and starts a treatment plan. After tests are done, it has been found that a different, much rarer condition exists. This then creates a bias that makes it hard to think through everything thoroughly. This filter means that any new information that comes in is downplayed or altered to support the old diagnosis. To rethink the old diagnosis, doctors risk losing the patient altogether. To do this, they need to practice techniques such as diagnostic time-outs.
Personal Finance and Investing
You put a lot of money in a stock because you believe in the company and think it will do well. After a while, the company starts to do worse and worse. People start losing money, and the company’s management changes. Selling the stock may feel like a failure, so instead of selling, you hope it will do better and turn around. This type of the dispatch bias makes it so that because the person committed to a decision, however bad of a decision it may be, it makes it so that there is neglect of the new bad financial situation.
Daily Logistics and Personal Productivity
Your day begins with a complete to-do list. But an urgent call comes in from a colleague about a potential collaboration, or you may need to fix your leaky sink. If you spend your day on what you’ve “dispatched,” you will miss the call and end up resenting the distraction. You will spend the day ignoring the most critical tasks. Your productivity system, meant to serve you, becomes a master because of the dispatch bias.
Strategic Planning and Military Operations
History is full of examples of lost battles because the generals “committed” to a battle plan and failed to adapt to the shifting terrain. The plan becomes the idol. Delegate Commander’s Intent and Adaptive OODA loops (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) to counter the dispatch bias. They empower units to redispatch themselves based on current information.
Relationship and Communication Conflicts
During an argument, you “dispatch” a narrative about your partner’s intentions (“they’re being disrespectful”). When they start to explain her stressful day, you are interrupted with information that contradicts the previous narrative. You’ve lost the dispatch bias, as you ignore her explanation and use the stale information you were so proud of. This conflict is escalating, and it doesn’t need to.
4. The High Cost of Inaction: Identifying the Symptoms
How can you tell whether the dispatch bias operates within your team or in your own thinking? The following are warning signals:
- Downplaying New Information: Comments like “That’s just an anomaly” or “Let’s wait and see” when data suggesting a shift appears.
- Rationalizing the Status Quo: Too much breath and time are spent justifying why the current course should work, instead of assessing whether it is working.
- Communication Barriers: Junior team members or frontline workers think the “decision has been made,” and stop raising their hands.
- Sunk Cost Narratives: “We’ve come too far to turn back now,” or “We’ve already spent so much” are sunk cost irrationalities.
- Increased Effort to Stay on the Current Path: The higher the effort to keep the original plan, like patching a leaking boat instead of heading to shore, the greater.
5. Counter-Strategy Toolkit: Seven Ways to Fight Back
- Institutionalize the Pre-Mortem. Before making big plans, gather the team and say, “It is a year from now, and this plan has failed terribly. Why did it fail?”
- Appoint a Devil’s Advocate. At specific moments in the plan, someone’s role is to defend the plan from criticism.
- Implement Clear Recall Triggers. Use facts to set a trigger for a plan to be reviewed.
- Separate identity from decision. Create a culture where learning replaces blame.
- Practice the 10-Minute Re-deliberation. Focus only on the new information.
- Use the plan as a Living Map, not a Fixed Railway. Emphasize flexibility.
- Perform Decision Audits. Revisit key decisions without blame.
6. Fostering a Dispatch-Agile Mindset
Dispatch-Agility is the notion that the best plan is the one that best serves the goal, not the one created first. Some agile thinkers do not see the change into a plan as a failure of the initial decision, but rather as a success of the monitoring process. They know that the ability to redirect remains the most significant competitive advantage.
7. Conclusion: The Power of Strategic Recall
Letting the dispatch bias work in your favor is a double-edged sword. When the bias is understood, symptoms are recognized, and structured tools are used to combat it, the agency is reclaimed. The goal is not constant second-guessing, but maintaining flexibility and the ability to dispatch and recall plans when new information arrives. The most relevant time to change your course was when you first received new information. The time to do it is now.
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