Omicron took over from delta in the U.S. last month, as it’s a vastly more infectious variant of COVID-19 and our vaccines offer much lower protection from infection without a booster.

Despite plenty of warnings from risk management and cognitive bias experts, leaders are repeating the same mistakes we fell into with delta.

What explains this puzzling behavior? Leaders — like the rest of us — are prone to falling for dangerous judgment errors, called cognitive biases. Rooted in wishful thinking, these mental blind spots lead to poor strategic and financial decisions when evaluating choices.

One of the biggest challenges relevant to omicron is the cognitive bias known as the ostrich effect. Named after the myth that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when they fear danger, the ostrich effect refers to people denying negative reality. Delta illustrated the high likelihood of additional dangerous variants, yet business and political leaders denied the reality of this risk.

When we learn one way of functioning in any area, we tend to stick to that way of functioning. You might have heard of this as the hammer-nail syndrome: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That syndrome is called functional fixedness. This cognitive bias causes leaders used to their old ways of action to reject any alternatives, whether in drug approval or work arrangements.

The way forward is to defeat cognitive biases and avoid denying reality by rethinking our approach to the future. In short, instead of trying to turn back the clock to the lost world of January 2020, consider how we might adapt to our new normal. COVID will never go away; we need to learn to live with it. That means reacting appropriately and thoughtfully to new variants and being intentional about our trade-offs.

Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts.