You would be wrong.
In a now-famous psychology experiment from the late 1990s, University of Illinois professor Daniel Simons and his collaborator Christopher Chabris filmed two teams of college students passing a basketball. Viewers are asked to count how many times the white team passes the ball. About halfway through, a person in a full life-sized gorilla suit walks calmly across the stage.
After the video ends, the audience is asked: did you see it? About half didn’t.
The experiment has been replicated thousands of times. Men or women, high IQ or low, detail-oriented or creative, young or old, the result is always the same. I watched it myself. I would have testified in court there was no gorilla. The neuroscience is now well understood: the brain, overwhelmed with input, selectively ignores most of what the eyes actually see. It’s called inattentional blindness. When you’re focused on one thing, you will miss other things (including large, obvious ones).
Simons followed up in 2010, showing the video to audiences who already knew about the gorilla, but with subtle new changes added. Even knowing to look, 80% of viewers missed the changes entirely. If you’re focused on finding one thing, you’ll miss something else.
The implications for your organization:
About half the time, you and your team will not see things that are right in front of them. Not abstract concepts, real, obvious things. This is normal human neurology, not negligence.
So: what are you missing? What is your team missing? And how do you react when a staff member doesn’t see something that seems obvious to you? If the answer is frustration or impatience, what does that do to your culture?
Run the video at your next team meeting. You’ll be amazed at what happens.
These are the conversations we have in every Vistage room.
If this post hit home, the next step is to start a conversation.