Session Notes: Chairman's Opening Remarks – Day 2
Executive Summary
Brigitta Voss opened Day 2 with an interactive drawing exercise that revealed how cognitive biases and shared mental models create communication challenges in project management. The exercise demonstrated that while most people default to similar interpretations, critical misalignments occur when team members approach concepts differently, highlighting risks for biotech portfolio management.
Full Notes
Interactive Opening Reveals Cognitive Patterns
Voss began the session with an unexpected interactive exercise, asking participants to spend 60 seconds drawing a house, then pass their drawings clockwise for others to improve in 30 seconds. The results were predictably uniform - most participants drew houses with steep roofs, front doors, windows, and many added conventional elements like chimneys with smoke, trees, paths, and fences. This seemingly simple activity revealed the power of shared cultural and cognitive defaults that shape how we interpret even basic concepts.
Mental Models Create Project Management Risks
Voss connected the drawing exercise to critical challenges in project management and biotech portfolio leadership. She highlighted that when we describe requirements or objectives, nine out of ten people will interpret them similarly based on shared mental models, but inevitably someone will run in a completely different direction. This misalignment risk is particularly acute in biotech where technical complexity, regulatory requirements, and commercial considerations must be precisely coordinated across diverse teams with different expertise and backgrounds.
Cultural Conditioning Shapes Professional Decisions
The session emphasized how deeply embedded cultural conditioning influences professional decision-making. Voss noted that even Microsoft software reinforces these patterns - when we see a house icon, it typically features a steep roof and recognizable elements that match our cultural expectations. In biotech portfolio management, these unconscious defaults can create blind spots where teams assume alignment exists when fundamental differences in interpretation remain unaddressed, potentially derailing complex development programs.
Action Items
- → All participants — Discuss learnings from drawing exercise about dealing with different thinking patterns open
Key Insights (8)
Interactive opening exercise reveals cognitive biases
Brigitta Voss Communication assumptions create project risks
Brigitta Voss Mental model awareness needed for portfolio success
Brigitta Voss Assumption alignment prevents project derailment
Brigitta Voss Cultural defaults shape biotech decision making
Brigitta Voss Nine think alike, one runs differently
Brigitta Voss Shared mental models in project management
Brigitta Voss House drawing exercise for team alignment
Brigitta Voss Full Transcript (click to expand)
Apr 23, 2026 Opening remarks day 2 - Transcript 00:00:00 : I'm going to grab You can say like morning I have something for you. Are you already? Okay, baby. Good morning everyone. Good morning. I'd love to start even though it's a qu it's quite empty here. U maybe we can close the doors. Someone um want to do a quick game in the beginning. Uh everyone we are going. Everyone please grab a piece of paper and a pen very quickly. Tim might be good if you move to the table next for the moment and then we get started. Everyone ready having a pen and a piece of paper? Good. You have 60 seconds to draw a house. So the first ready and it's finished. Okay, then we stop and you hand your drawing to someone else on the at the table. Just clockwise, anticlockwise. Yeah, you're right. Okay, we have not yet finished exercise, guys. So, now you have 30 seconds or even less to make the drawing nicer. 00:03:50 : and and stop. Can you show the first slide? Mhm. So, who made who painted a house which kind of looked like the one the blue one? A classical Yeah, that's the typical we who has a house with a steep roof. Who has a house with a door in the front? windows. When you made the the other one nice, who pay um draw a tree in front of it? A path. A fence. No fence. A chimney. Chimney with smoke. Perfect. And now the second one. Second. So I mean just for everyone to remind we have a certain way of thinking about stuff. It's just in our brain and our c culture and everything we see. And even when we open the Microsoft software home is a house with a steep roof. We recognize it as a house simply because it's a quadrant and it has the steep roof. And there are so many other things. I mean we are in project management we talk about we talk with people we talk with concepts there are so many things to think about it we have 10 people nine will think exactly like us and then there are two we say yes we run that way because we want to go we describe what we want and then two run into a completely different and I leave you to Five minutes to discuss the learning of that. How do we deal with people? While I prepare Tim with the mic learnings, no learnings. Yes, I just told like that was like so like different interactions yesterday like we were laughing. So now his start the next Okay. Transcription ended after 00:07:57 This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.