How to evaluate (ourselves and others) in the most correct way and avoid the 'Ikea effect'.

"It's not my dish!" was always the final assessment.

Fortunately, we were able to laugh about it and we did not break relations, but we did experience a few small moments of tension.

What was happening to us was that we were both using, albeit from two different points of view, the bias from the name IKEA Effect.

The IKEA effect is a psychological phenomenon that leads us to classify things done by us (even if done badly or uselessly) as useful and better than things done by other people, because we have put our energy and effort into them.

Psychologists who have studied it refer to it as 'the increase in the evaluation of self-made products' and in a very illustrative way it has the name of the well-known company that led us to make various artefacts with great effort but with proud satisfaction once we succeeded.

The reasons why we value the things we make most are related to three factors.

1) The investment of time and energy, which leads us to consider what we have done as important and to create an emotional attachment to the result achieved. This personal attachment influences the perception of value.

2) The satisfaction of having completed a task that tends to belong to others, perceived as more competent.

3) The feeling that we are, indeed, competent and capable, which can increase our self-esteem.

This effect is highly valued in marketing and has the value of driving increasing customer involvement in co-creation, potentially increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty and helping to reduce costs for companies.

But in my opinion, for the individual and in business decisions, it has to be handled very carefully.

The risk of the IKEA effect is that it not only makes us perceive what we have made as better and more valuable than what it actually is, but can also lead us to devalue the valuable ideas or good work of people other than ourselves.

My mother-in-law's comments stemmed from her frustration at not being able to have her hands full and having to accept that something normally done by her could be done by others and be equivalent.

For my part, the irritation that occasionally gripped me at her comments was related precisely to not being able to fully enjoy my IKEA Effect: I was cooking dishes that were new to me, which I thought were wonderful and which I felt in my gut were so much better than the ones she prepared (although I would not have confessed it even under torture) that I began to believe I was a competent cook.

If we do not carefully control this effect, we risk falling in love with our solutions, our methods and our products, and we are no longer objective in reading our surroundings.

In personal life or in professional reality, we risk not questioning what we are doing, just because we are doing it. Or we make great wastes, because instead of comparing ourselves with someone more capable than us, we set to work without perhaps verifying the extent of the effort and the costs to be incurred. Or, even worse, in order to safeguard our need for self-fulfilment, we find faults and errors in things that are actually excellent but have been achieved by others.

So what should we do to protect ourselves from the potential risks of the IKEA effect? Here are some suggestions on things to do:

- give up our personal need to feel more competent or better than others

- check what others are doing in our field with curiosity and a willingness to learn

- use objective criteria to evaluate our results and to compare them with those of others

- always ask for feedback and opinions from those who were not involved in the creation of our product and who can be impartial.

In short, get out of the furniture we have built and do not be afraid to question what we have done.

*Partner bbsette - Consulting, Training and Professional Games.