“Leaders often fail to notice when they are obsessed by other issues, when they are motivated to not notice, and when there are other people in their environment working hard to keep them from noticing.”
– Harvard Business School Professor Max Bazerman The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
As a leader you’re responsible for making key decisions each day. But how confident are you in your ability to notice all pertinent information?
If you’re like most leaders, you probably believe your perception skills are keen. As convinced as you may be, it’s possible that you’re overestimating your aptitude. What’s in front of you is rarely all there is.
Even if you have a superior grasp of common blind spots, you must remain alert for unplanned surprises and acknowledge your cognitive biases. Even the most venerated leaders make egregious mistakes, failing to notice – or even ignoring – essential data. As they handle an emerging crisis, they may ask: “How did this happen?” or “Why didn’t I catch this sooner?”
They should really be asking themselves:
- “What information should I have gathered, beyond the basic facts?”
- “What information would have helped inform my decision?”
More than a decade of research shows that successful leaders take no notice of critical, readily available information in their environment. This often happens when they have blinders on, focusing on limited information they’ve predetermined to be necessary to make good decisions.
What YouTube Can Teach Us
In a popular YouTube video, viewers are asked to watch a basketball game and tally the number of passes made.
The social scientists behind the video don’t really care whether you accurately record the passes. What truly interests them is whether you notice the man in the gorilla suit who walks onto the court (in earlier research, they featured a women with a red umbrella). You can search for similar experiments on YouTube using the terms inattentional blindness or selective attention.
Many viewers are so focused on counting passes that they miss seeing the gorilla or red umbrella. The same phenomenon frequently occurs when we problem-solve and make business decisions. We see only what we define as the “important information” – something 1978 Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon termed “bounded rationality”.
More recently, Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, demonstrated that systematic and predictable biases affect even the best and brightest among us. Even when we strive to be ethical and rational, we miss – or fail to seek out – critical information that’s readily available in our environment.
As always I would love to hear from you, I can be reached here or on LinkedIn.
