Stay Focused on Solutions
How many times has a great solution stared you right in the face, yet somehow you missed it? It always seems amazing after the fact, doesn’t it? So how do we start seeing the endless solutions that surround us each and every day? Before answering that question, let’s understand how we miss them in the first place. In part, it’s due to a phenomenon psychologists call “perceptual blindness” or “inattentional blindness.”
Consider the following example: Professor Daniel Simons and his psychology students asked volunteers to watch a short video. In the video, team members (one team dressed in black shirts, the other in white shirts) passed a basketball back and forth. The volunteers were told to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white. At some point, a person in a gorilla suit appears during the video. When the video ended, researchers asked if anybody saw anything unusual. Only half of the volunteers reported seeing the gorilla. The other half reported to have seen nothing unusual.
Here’s a video based on the original study:
How could people not notice the gorilla in the room? Mostly because they weren’t looking for it. They were focused on something else. Magicians have known about this phenomenon for years… so have politicians.
Here’s another example called the “Door Study”
This helps explain how experts can be more susceptible to perceptual blindness than beginners, and why “outsiders” often find solutions that experienced “insiders” miss. Beginners and outsiders are usually more open to possibilities because they don’t make common assumptions. By extension, they’re often better at finding solutions the experts have stopped seeing.
Perceptual blindness sheds much light on why we miss obvious solutions… especially those we mislabel as problems. By focusing on one thing (a problem), we miss something else (a solution). So why not refocus on solutions? This is one of the topics in my upcoming book: “Pink Bat: Turning Problems Into Solutions.” It should be available for the holiday season… I’ll keep you posted.
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Nice Post. Something I always try to do is to write down my initial inclinations when working on a new problem or joining a new team and then revisiting my writings later. My experience in consulting is that a new employee is always “socialized” for several weeks by senior members before being asked to contribute. Why not probe the new member for insights and thoughts? Definitely much opportunity lost here.
Thank you, Luke. I like your ideas and agree with them. It’s hard to not suffer from perceptual blindness over time and stop seeing opportunities and new solutions. The idea of writing down your initial observations and revisiting them is a great idea, too. We once hired a designer from Europe… before his first week ended he came into my office with a list of observations… such as, our computer system needed upgrading, and so on. It was bold and he upset a few people… but we listened to him and concluded he was right. It’s easy to dismiss the new person and make him/her the outcast. Successful companies keep an open mind and listen to different perspectives (including the least likely suspects). I appreciate your insight.