Kookmin Leadership Academy: Why Cognitive Bias Kills More Innovation than a Lack of Ideas

Innovation fails far more often than it should. Not because people lack imagination. Not because teams are short on ideas. But because of how those ideas are evaluated, prioritized, and filtered—often unconsciously. The hidden culprit? Cognitive bias.

This was the focus of a recent lecture I gave in Seoul for KOLA – the Kookmin Leadership Academy, part of Kookmin University’s MBA. KOLA is not a traditional university setting. It is a leadership hub for working professionals and alumni, a place where experienced individuals return to challenge their own thinking and deepen their strategic abilities.

I was invited to speak on a topic that rarely gets enough airtime in innovation circles: how cognitive biases undermine decision-making long before creativity ever has a chance to deliver. My audience was made up of senior professionals—managers, directors, founders—many of them already leading high-performing teams. They knew how to execute. But they also understood the quiet risks of getting stuck in outdated mental models.

We started by examining how bias is not just a psychological concept, but a practical business constraint. Confirmation bias, groupthink, loss aversion, sunk cost fallacy—these patterns shape not only what we believe to be true, but also how we define problems, which voices we prioritize, and what risks we avoid.

In one case study, I shared how a global innovation team dismissed a radical, user-driven insight because it contradicted an internal success metric. The product failed in-market—not because the idea lacked merit, but because the team couldn’t see past their frame. They weren’t lacking creativity. They were lacking cognitive agility.

This is where Design Thinking+ comes in. It’s the methodology I’ve developed to expand traditional design thinking by directly addressing the psychological and cultural obstacles that sabotage innovation efforts. It integrates:

Unlike classic frameworks, Design Thinking+ begins with a commitment to rethinking how we think. It brings awareness to mental shortcuts. It creates space for contradiction and productive tension. It trains leaders to spot premature convergence.

What stood out during the KOLA session was the quality of the dialogue. The Q&A wasn’t polite. It was urgent, grounded, and rigorous. Participants shared examples of organizational friction, cultural blind spots, and the pressure to conform to proven success paths. They weren’t asking “how do we get more ideas?” They were asking, “how do we make space for the right ones to survive?”

This, to me, is where the real work of leadership lies. Not in protecting a process, but in protecting a mindset that remains open, analytical, and humble enough to question itself.

I’m deeply grateful to Prof. Kibok Baik, whose generosity, insight, and bridge-building between cultures made this lecture possible. KOLA’s mission to foster next-level leadership in Korea is clear. But its relevance extends far beyond. In a Western context obsessed with speed and scale, we too often ignore the internal dynamics that quietly shape success or failure.

My takeaway: Executives in the West can no longer afford to treat cognitive bias as a soft science. It’s a structural risk. And unless we embed bias awareness into the core of our innovation practices, we will continue to misallocate attention, resources, and talent.

The good news? These mental patterns can be seen. And what we can see, we can change.