MISTAKE #22: Your focus makes you blind

Have you seen the following video?  If not, take 2-minutes to view it before reading any more of this article.  SPOILER ALERT:  The video is a test of concentration that consists of counting the number of times people pass a basketball.

So did you pass the test?  Did you count the right number of passes (15)? 

And did you see the gorilla?

Back around 2000, before this study got a lot of airplay thanks to the internet, more than half of a room of intelligent people like yourself would miss the gorilla.

I call this Generalized Selective Attention:  It represents the mistakes people make after they get trained and rewarded for doing a particular task requiring limited skill.  This is true of analysts in particular, who learn to be consistent and efficient at what they do, but occasionally (perhaps frequently) miss the proverbial gorilla in data because that is not what they’re paid to do.

Perhaps they keep looking for new answers to the same question when they should be asking a different question.

Or analyses are done just to deliver the same weekly report, not to discover new insights.

Maybe wrong marketplace assumptions are perpetuated because no one wants to put in the effort to challenge them.

Remember that good decision-making begins with knowing where to look and what to look for.

THE GORILLA IN THE GLASS

 As with any great psychology test, people update and modify the parameters to continue learning.

The gorilla was reincarnated more recently in a test among highly-trained radiologists.  While the original test involved the unskilled act of counting passes of a basketball, this test wanted to see if these highly educated, highly skilled doctors could possibly make a similar oversight while reviewing MRI slides.  Could it be possible that any doctors would miss a matchbook-sized gorilla superimposed on slides while looking for the life-altering presence of much smaller anomalies that could indicate cancerous activity?

Surprise!  83% of these doctors looked right past the gorilla (which I assume could cause as much of a health risk inside a patient as most other anomalies).

Shocking, right?  Seriously.  Shocking.

 I like to call this type of error Specialized Selective Attention:  It represents the mistakes made by companies (and people) as their experience and comfort with the subject matter increases. 

Perhaps the keep taking the same approach to a sales pitch and line review presentations, not realizing that it is no longer 1995 and clipart isn’t cute any more.

Or they’ve stopped listening to their customer and trying to find new unmet needs.  No one in the organization is developing and testing new hypotheses with all the data they have access to.

Maybe they still rely on the ‘average’ to represent a complex dataset that has significant outliers and sub-segments that look nothing like that average.

DON’T BE BLIND 

Few people have the observational and deductive power of Sherlock Holmes.  It is human nature to get comfortable with tasks we have practiced a thousand times and start to overlook little details.

Consider how new eyes could be just what you need to kick start future growth. 

Consider how obvious the gorilla in the room might be to someone that hasn’t been trained so well to make the gorilla invisible

Consider the unique perspective that comes from over 100 clients and work on 150+ categories.  Maybe I should really change my job title to Gorilla Hunter.