When you say overcoming cognitive bias, do you also mean it will help being able to step back from a problem and think outside the box?

Not exactly, stepping back is part of it, thinking outside the box is not.

It means overcoming preconceived ways of thinking, ways that you would tend to think given limited information or denying contrary evidence because it doesn't fit what you think ahead of time -- fitting facts to a theory (bad) rather than building a theory based on facts (good).

For example (and to use a constant source of flame wars here on HN), suppose I'm a huge Apple fan. Apple announces a developer policy change, say, 70% of all app revenue goes to Apple instead of the smaller percentage today.

If I have a cognitive bias (Apple can do no wrong), I might think that this change would only increase app quality since high quality apps already sell a lot, and the change would drive out low quality (low volume) apps that confuse the competitive marketspace and thus increase sales for the high quality apps.

Since I'm biased for Apple, I'm preconditioned to think that anything Apple does is good (even when it's not). I may even go through all manner of fact dismissal, evidence twisting, etc. to make sure Apple comes out looking good over this issue in my mind. In other words, I have a theory and I'm making darn sure the facts fit that theory.

See pretty much any Daring Fireball post for an example of some of the best textbook cognitive bias I've ever seen in print in the tech space.

If I'm able to overcome my cognitive bias I might see this for what it is, a money grab.

Now going the other way, say I'm preconditioned to dislike Apple. In this scenario Apple may announce a new device, say a watch that understands voice commands and has a pico projector so I can see things on a largish screen, the iWatch or some such. I might make remarks that this will be a failure because, who wants to watch movies on their watch? And the Timex Datalink was a huge failure. And as everybody knows voice command of computers sucks. But I'm biased against Apple and will try to find a way to hate anything they make.

Now if I were able to overcome this bias, I might be able to come to the conclusion that it's not a bad idea, but I don't have enough information to come to a judgement so I'll wait, read reviews, try it out a bit, and if it's cool and useful maybe get it. If not, I'll ignore it and move on.

It's about critical thinking and rational thought and is one of the hardest things for people to do, even when they think they are.