I Can See Clearly Now

Or not. Being a dissertation on the process of making lousy decisions.

Ever wonder how some big-time decision-makers wind up making such lousy decisions? It's easy (and not necessarily wrong) to chalk some of them up to a combination of arrogance, greed, and simple immorality. The Vioxx and FEMA debacles come immediately to mind as examples. In an article in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year, however, Max H. Bazerman and Dolly Chugh suggest that there may be another factor operating. They call it "bounded awareness"; most of the rest of us would probably call it "tunnel vision".

According to the authors, "bounded awareness" happens "when cognitive blinders prevent a person from seeing, seeking, using, or sharing highly relevant, easily accessible, and readily perceivable information during the decision-making process". This can cause decision-makers to miss important information just because it's not readily available or because they don't appreciate its significance. It can also result in a failure to share that information because, again, someone has failed to notice that it is, in fact, important.

In a January 9th interview for Computerworld, Bazerman elaborates on these ideas and offers examples of the phenomenon from the lab of Cornell's Ulric Neisser (a key figure in the study of human perception and the guy who coined the term "cognitive psychology" back in 1967, for those of you keeping score) that involve the use of visual illusions. In one study, subjects asked to focus on one particular aspect of a video - how many times a soccer ball is passed among the players - completely miss another aspect that would be obvious to anyone not focused on that first aspect. In this case, it was a woman holding an umbrella walking right through the middle of the game.

Now, this sort of stuff is fascinating to me because, before I became a Technology Professional (and got my official Propellor Beanie, complete with MP3 player, webcam, 1 gigabyte of VRAM and Windows Beanie Edition), I was, among other things, a psychology grad student specializing in visual and auditory perception and statistics. I was also an amateur magician. Findings like this, therefore, are no big surprise to me. What was a bit of an eye-opener was this quote from the Bazerman interview: "In Neisser's study, only 21% saw her. My experience with executives is closer to 3%".

Yup, that's right: according to Bazerman, the guys making the big decisions at the big corporations/governments/whatever are roughly seven times more likely to succumb to tunnel vision than us ordinary mortals.

Of course, anybody can fall prey to this. I have found myself doing it more than once. Unfortunately, the skill to focus and concentrate on a single task - a vital one, especially in IT - is at war with the ability to step back, take a look at the larger picture, and ask yourself whether or not you might be missing something that's right under your nose.

So we all need to make sure we're not missing the woman with the umbrella. She might be trying to tell us that it's going to rain.