“Your purpose is to serve others in need, or it simply becomes an exercise to serve your own greed.” #RichDiddams, Dean, #LibertyUniversity School of Business
This week’s episode builds on Monday’s article, part three in the series titled “Complementary Contradictions.” Here is the transcript of the podcast.
There are times when you get conflicting words of advice, one which is good and the other which is not, and it requires discernment to determine which is the right advice to follow. But often, you may hear conflicting counsel that seems to be contradictory to each other, but which is actually complementary and, when used appropriately and in the right way, can work together to help you make better decisions. That’s what we are going to be talking about in the next weeks, in both the www.LeadershipEzra.com website articles and on the weekly podcast. We will be looking at different leadership ideas or principles that seem to contradict, or at least differ from each other, and we are going to pair them up to see how they actually complement each other to make you a better leader. Today, in part 2, we are discussing the second half of a pair, and will be talking about the idea of “You don’t see what you are not looking for”.
In the last episode, we talked about the idea that you see what you are looking for. The point we made was that, whether we realize it or not, we all develop perceptions of how we need to experience the world around us. Those perceptions tend to be based on either past experience or future expectations, or a combination of both. We either have an experience, positive or negative, real or imagined, or we have a specific expectation that we are anticipating, and we then form a perception based on which we look for a certain outcome, and only see the things that confirm that outcome. Consciously or not, we decide what we are looking for, and only see what affirms or confirms what we expect to see.
In today’s episode, we are flipping the coin to the other side. On the one side, we tend to see what we are looking for, but on the other side, we also tend to not see what we are not looking for.
Have you ever been looking for something in your refrigerator or medicine cabinet, and you can’t find it no matter how much you look, but then someone else grabs it right from under your nose? My wife needed to use some Vaseline, so I went to get it for her from the linen closet. I looked high and low but couldn’t find it. I went to the store, and when I found the Vaseline, all that I could see were (in my perspective) large containers. In my mind, I thought that it only came in smaller containers, but I didn’t see those there. Wouldn’t you know, when I got home, I immediately found the Vaseline that we already had, in a larger container in the linen closet. I realized that I had looked right at it in the closet but hadn’t seen it because I was looking for something much smaller. I didn’t see what I wasn’t looking for.
I’ve done the same thing countless times in the food pantry or in the refrigerator, looking for something with an unconscious image in my mind of what the thing looks like, and in these instances, instead of seeing what I was looking for, and because it’s what I was looking to see, I completely overlooked the thing that was right there in front of me. Once again, I didn’t see what I was not looking for.
Think about when there is a constant, repeating noise, like a ceiling fan or the humming of an air conditioner, that you tune out after a little while and don’t even notice that it is there anymore. Your mind is focusing on other things, so it tunes those things out, and eventually, you don’t even realize that they are there. That’s what is happening here. It’s too overwhelming to see everything, so your brain filters out what is not necessary or relevant, and even though it’s there, you don’t see it. Therefore, if you have a picture in your mind of what you are focusing on, your brain filters out the other things.
This idea applies to your leadership. Whether it’s people or circumstances, it’s easy for us to miss something important because we are not looking for it. It may be because we don’t want to see it, or because we are looking for something else, or because we are not paying attention. Regardless of the reason, we miss something important, and it results in a difficult challenge. Once, when I was a new head of school in a new school, I was also serving as the student government advisor so that I could be connected to the student culture. Based on my previous school experience, I had a great idea for a homecoming week activity, and I pushed the student leaders toward it. In my mind, it was a great idea (it had worked great someplace else, so, of course it would here!), and I was only thinking about how good this would be for the students and expected them to respond that way. I didn’t even see that they were not receiving it well. It was later that their discontent with the idea – and with me – came out when someone else pointed it out to me. Because I didn’t see what I wasn’t looking for, I had a mess to clean up.
Do see how that happens? Or should I ask, do you not see how that happens because you weren’t looking for it? And just like the discussion last week of seeing what you look for, the struggle of not seeing what we are not looking for leaves me with a couple of thoughts:
1) Be self-aware. Recognize how your own expectations and viewpoint can cause you to miss something important, and step back to make sure you are not allowing a “predetermined bias” to prevent you from seeing what you need to see.
2) Be intentional about gathering information and listening carefully before you decide what you are seeing or what you are looking for. Otherwise, you won’t see what you are not looking for.
The pair of principles we’ve discussed these two weeks go together: You see what you’re looking for, and you don’t see what you’re not looking for. With these two ideas working together, you can become much more careful and prudent about seeing what you need to see, which in turn will lead to better decisions and, therefore, better leadership.
Sometimes, you get conflicting words of advice, one which is good and the other which is not, and it requires discernment to determine which is the right advice to follow. But often, these seeming contradictions are, in reality, complementary and, when used appropriately and in the right way, can work together to help you make better decisions. In this series of articles and podcast episodes, we are looking at different leadership ideas or principles that seem to contradict, are opposite, or at least differ from each other and pairing them up to see how they actually complement each other to make you a better leader. Last week, we explored the idea that “You see what you are looking for,” and this week, the idea that “You don’t see what you are not looking for.”
Have you ever spent hours looking for something that you lost, only to find it sometime later in an obvious and open place? I have, and it usually causes me to mutter something like, “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, it was right in front of me!” Don’t those experiences make you wonder why you couldn’t see it in the first place? This tendency seems to reflect an idea referred to by Chabris and Simons in The Invisible Gorilla (2010) as “the illusion of attention.”
The illusion of attention is the idea that “we experience far less of our visual world than we think we do,” as Chabris and Simons state, so, “when people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.” They go on to explain that “we know how vividly we see some aspects of our world, but we are completely unaware of those aspects of our world that fall outside of that current focus of attention,”, and that “we are only aware of the unexpected objects we do notice, not the ones we have missed.”. What this all really means is that, although we believe we notice everything, especially if we are looking, we tend to miss a lot of what is right in front of us, primarily because we are not looking for that specific thing in that specific way. Therefore when I am looking for something that I have lost, without realizing it I am expecting it to look a certain way and be in a certain place, so I then overlook it when it is not in that place or it looks different than what I remember or expect; essentially, “your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see – and what you miss.”.
The same illusion of attention takes place in the context and environment of an organization, and in ways beyond the noticing of specific physical objects. When leaders are analyzing the present culture of the organization, planning for the future, or trying to identify issues and opportunities, it can be very easy to look around or look ahead with an unconscious expectation of what you will see; the result is that you will likely see what you are looking for but will miss what you are not looking for, and not even realize it. There may be an opportunity to tap into someone’s strength or ability, there may be an idea or a new method developing in a department, or there may be a problem that needs to be addressed, but because you are not looking for it, you miss it. And when you miss it, you may lose an opportunity or create greater difficulty.
So how do you open your eyes to see more of what you might otherwise miss? I remember a number of years ago the popularity of 3D optical illusions (also called stereograms) – pictures that looked like flat geometric patterns, but when you stared into the picture and allowed your eyes to relax and un-focus, looking beyond the flat image, a 3-dimensional image would appear. There was more to the image than the first look revealed, but it required intentional effort and a different way of looking. In the same way, when you are leading an organization, there must be intentional effort to see, and to see beyond what is in front of you or what you are expecting to see. How do you do that?
- First, recognize our tendency to not see what we are not looking for.
- Then, remove any expectations of what you think you might see.
- After that, you can work at zooming out and zooming in – trying to step back and take a wide-angle look at everything, then looking at more specific details, then stepping back for a wide-lens look again, and so on.
- Finally, you can also try to look through different eyes, by trying to see through the approach or perspective of other people or other angles.
It’s fairly easy to miss things that you are not looking for. I’ve done it when I was trying to introduce a new change that I assumed everyone would get behind, and because of what I was therefore expecting to see (their support), I only saw the examples of support and completely missed the grumbling from those who were resisting. You could probably guess that this eventually created difficulty in the change implementation because I had failed to see it and address it early. I looked, but I didn’t see because I was only looking for what I expected to see. So, as Chabris and Simons said, “looking is not sufficient for seeing”; because our tendency is to only see what we are looking for, it takes a conscious effort to see things that you are not looking for.
Chabris, C., and Simons, D. (2010). The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. MJF Books: New York, NY.