Perception and Reality
Lately I’ve been thinking about perception. When we focus on something we exclude other things and thus create our own reality. Perception becomes reality.
Last week I heard Mark Zinder say “what we focus on limits what we see”. A different take on the same issue. He shared a wonderful story about a study where they showed a number of experienced radiologists an x-ray of a patients chest. In the x-ray were minute specs of cancer spread throughout the lungs. The radiologists found the minute cancer specs easily.
However, the radiologists all failed to notice the picture of a gorilla about the size of a matchbook that was embedded in the x-ray. When asked they responded that they are not supposed to find gorillas. They were able to find what they were looking for while being totally oblivious to something much larger and clearly out of place right in front of them.
As we focus our attention on smaller and smaller things we exclude more and more from our perception. Sometimes it’s good as when radiologists are able to detect minute cancer sites before they spread. But sometimes it’s bad. What if instead of a matchbook size gorilla what they missed was a matchbook sized blood clot in the lungs?
“What we focus on limits what we see.”
As with radiologists in the medical world, there are many business areas where extreme focus is needed to gain expertise. I hope the engineers and other people who designed and built the many airplanes I regularly fly were fully focused on the tasks in front of them. I hope the pilots flying my airplane are extremely focused on the instruments in the cockpit…but I also hope the pilots are focused on what’s going on around the airplane.
A conundrum, the need for total focus on the internal situation while also needing to be focused on what is going on externally.
Then there’s the business executives and leaders. Their need is to be aware of what’s going on throughout their organization while staying on top of what’s going on around the world. Is it possible? Can anyone be focused on the small things and the big picture at the same time?
It’s clearly difficult. Numerous stories elucidate the disasters that have come as executives have focused too tightly. Remember when Blackberry owned the mobile phone market? Focusing internally led to the leaders missing what their competitors were doing and the way the market was rapidly changing. I loved my Blackberry and would have one still except for seeing an iPhone in action.
Perception about being unassailable led to disaster.
Some have figured out how to have both, exceptional external focus combined with exceptional internal focus. In the cases I know of they did by being one member of a pair of twins. A pair of twins with great but divergent focus and exceptional ability to communicate with each other. One focused inside, the COO or as we say in EOS – the Integrator, and one focused outside or in EOS – The Visionary.
Two people tightly connected who together overcome the issue of where to focus and how to expand rather than constrict your perception and the reality it brings. Think Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger.
