Upstream Ag Professional - April 12th 2026

Index

Thank you for being an Upstream Ag Professional member!

This week’s audio edition had some technical challenges — I tried using a new software for recording, and it does not allow a compression of file size, which makes the file too large to upload to my podcast platform, so I uploaded the full recorded video/audio component that can be found below. Sorry about the hassle. I will go back to the old software next week.

My original major at university was psychology. I have long had a fascination with how humans think. That has drawn me into always looking for improved methods for understanding the world, and the agriculture industry. That’s why I published 33 Mental Models for Agribusiness Leaders (as an aside, there is a special podcast edition with Tim Hammerich on The Future of Agriculture in the second story below) — I believe there are tools and systems out there to gain an edge, particularly for knowledge workers.

However, one thing that stands out to me is that sometimes it’s not about always improving — just removing stupidity instead.

A famous Charlie Munger quote surrounding Berkshire Hathaway success was influential on me in this regard:

Avoiding stupid decisions can be as valuable, or more, than trying to have a net-new, brilliant idea.

One of the main sources for stupid decisions are our own cognitive biases.

I have been collecting various biases that stand out to me for over a decade and wanted to put together a guide of 40 of the ones that stand out to me for improving decision making in agribusiness.

Below you will find the introduction and overview of the guide, or you can go directly read it in the link above, or download the PDF below.

40 cognitives biases is a lot to hold in your head. For clarity, the goal of this was never to create a checklist you consult before every decision. It’s not practical, and it's not how I think the utility of this document actually arises.

The more realistic path is focusing based on your unique position.

Pick three or four biases that resonate most with your role and the decisions you make most often.

A capital allocator in an executive position should probably gain familiarity with the likes of loss aversion, sunk cost fallacy, and optimism bias. A commercial leader running a team should focus on groupthink, false consensus, and the curse of knowledge. Someone managing a trading book needs the disposition effect and clustering illusion near the top of the list.

From there, the goal should be to build some friction into your most consequential decisions — friction that helps ensure better outcomes by thinking critically about the decision at hand.

As an aside, I framed everything around optimizing decisions. I think there could have been an alternative framing and that’s more on the influence angle.

For example, there is an angle where the emphasis and examples surrounding many of the biases skew towards a title like “How to Win Customers and Influence Colleagues” rather than improved decision making. Understanding these biases allows you to improve your decision making, but it also allows you to exploit them. For example, in pricing, or idea positioning or in sales or program design, understanding cognitive biases is an advantage. Knowing how people tend to think gives an edge in business, and elsewhere.

From the report:

Every strategic decision in agribusiness passes through a human brain before it becomes action. That brain, regardless of the education or the decades of experience informing it, is running on cognitive software that evolved to avoid predators, and prioritize short term constraints, like food management or safety, not to optimize for being different, thinking long term or building systems that create success in business.

These sub-optimal approaches to thinking and decision making are known as cognitive biases.

They are patterns deviating from rational judgment and are not occasional mistakes or signs of low intelligence, however, they are predictable, measurable, and universal tendencies that affect how we process information, evaluate risk, remember outcomes, and interact with others.

They have long been central to my considerations when decision-making — though I remain far from perfect at managing them.

Early in my career, when I was training sales agronomists on agronomics or customer relationship building, I would open presentations by walking through the specific biases that would undermine the concepts I was about to teach, or that were driving the problems we were trying to solve.

The idea was to help individuals prime their minds to understand why how we think can work against us and bring a unique approach to catalyzing the training or conversation.

I think agribusiness professionals operating in high stakes environments should be even more aware of these biases – for those allocating capital and resources, managing a team, or setting strategic priorities. The higher the stakes and complexity of a role, the more cognitive biases can distort our judgment in ways that are hard to detect in the moment.

Warren Buffett’s long term business partner, the late Charlie Munger is known for bringing them into the mainstream, in part thanks to his famous speech from 1995 at Harvard called The Psychology of Human Misjudgement.

However, one of the individuals who was most influential in researching and discovering them, Daniel Kahneman, did more work than anyone surrounding these concepts. Thinking Fast and Slow introduced millions to a framework for understanding how and why we consistently make suboptimal decision. Yet what always stood out to me was that even Kahneman acknowledged he remained susceptible to the very biases he spent his career studying. 

I highlight this because full elimination shouldn’t be the goal, but awareness, combined with knowing when a particular bias is likely to surface, can meaningfully reduce the frequency and severity of mistakes — plus, enables professionals to alter environments for their teams and staff to be able to better manage them from making suboptimal decisions, too.

There are more than 200 recognized cognitive biases, however, over the last decade I have collected some of my favorite that I review consistently to try and improve my awareness of them. I wanted to take my rough document and piece it together with some coherence and apply it to agribusiness and share it as a useful resource for those interested in improving their psychological understanding and decision making abilities.

This breakdown examines 40 cognitive biases through the lens of agribusiness professional decision-making, for the likes of boardrooms, R&D labs, commercial teams, and executive suites where strategic decisions can influence billion dollar of outcomes.

For each bias, there are four main areas covered:

The biases are organized into six clusters based on the cognitive domain they primarily affect. For example, many biases interact with and reinforce each other. Loss aversion feeds the disposition effect. Confirmation bias amplifies groupthink. The narrative fallacy makes survivorship bias feel like insight. Understanding these interactions is as important as understanding the individual biases and I encourage you to keep in mind the relationships as you review them.