The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See - Hardcover

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Max Bazerman is the codirector of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School, and the author of numerous books, including Negotiation Genius with Deepak Malhotra, Blind Spots with Ann E. Tenbrunsel, and Judgment in Managerial Decision Making with Don A. Moore. He has taught, advised companies, and consulted to governments in thirty countries. He is on numerous editorial boards. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of London, the Life Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program, and the Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management, among many other awards.

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The Power of Noticing

Preface

Noticing: A Personal Journey

How many times can a man turn his head,
and pretend that he just doesn’t see?

BOB DYLAN, “BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND”

During the first few nights after 9/11, I awoke abruptly with an image of the second airplane veering into the second tower. Even given the magnitude of the tragedy, this was strange for me. The stress of life seldom disrupts my rest; I normally sleep well and rarely remember my dreams. Now I was waking up with the same frightening image many nights in a row, and I couldn’t fall back to sleep—again, rare for me. So I gave up, headed to my home office in the wee hours, and thought about what social scientists like me know about what had just happened to the United States. After a few nights of this pattern, I had a vague notion that 9/11 should have been anticipated—and prevented. Here are the core pieces of evidence I jotted down during those early mornings:

• The U.S. government knew that terrorists were willing to become martyrs for their cause and that their hatred toward the United States was increasing.

• In 1993 terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center.

• In 1994 terrorists had hijacked an Air France plane and made an aborted attempt to turn the plane into a missile aimed at the Eiffel Tower.

• Also in 1994 terrorists had attempted to simultaneously hijack twelve U.S. commercial airplanes in Asia.

• Airline passengers know how easy it is to board an airplane with items, such as small knives, that can be used as weapons.

Soon after collecting these thoughts, I was having coffee with Michael Watkins, then my Harvard Business School colleague, and mentioned my analysis of 9/11. Michael asked me to follow him into his office, where he pulled out a file labeled “Predictable Surprises,” which became the title of our 2003 book. This work focused on how individuals and organizations can learn to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize action to avoid serious predictable surprises. In the chapter of our book that analyzed 9/11 as a predictable surprise, we anticipated the eventual conclusion of the 9/11 Commission: “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.”1

When Michael and I wrote Predictable Surprises, I was a well-known scholar and teacher in the decision-making field. I had written its leading textbook and generally thought that I made pretty good decisions in life. In 2013 I was chosen to be codirector with David Gergen of the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership. A strong case can be made that, at its heart, leadership arises from effective decision making by individuals, teams, and organizations. That connection had long been on my mind but became all the more acute when writing about predictable surprises. I was beginning to realize that there was a serious gap in my understanding of human decision-making failures, a gap that also existed in the scientific and managerial literature on decision making. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that terrible things happen when our leaders fail to think about data that are outside their typical focus.

Two other episodes from my life drove home the truisms that all of us are prone to miss essential facts and that the benefits of widening our area of focus can be profound. First, in 2003 I attended a talk by another Harvard colleague, Mahzarin Banaji, where she showed a video—which you may have seen—made by psychologist Ulric Neisser in the 1970s. Before starting the eighteen-second video, Mahzarin told the audience that they would see two visually superimposed groups of three players passing a basketball. One trio wore white shirts, and the other trio wore dark shirts. Our task was to count the number of passes made by the trio wearing white shirts. The dual video, as well as the grainy nature of the film, made the task moderately complex. Before reading on, feel free to try to accurately count the passes among players wearing the white shirts in the Neisser video at http://www.people.hbs.edu/mbazerman/blindspots-ethics/neisser.html.

I counted the passes among the players with the white shirts, feeling confident. I am pretty good at focusing. When Mahzarin confirmed that the number of passes was eleven, the same number I had counted, I felt proud, mentally patting myself on the back. Then she asked the audience of a few hundred if they had seen anything unusual in the video. One woman in the back of the room mentioned “a woman with an umbrella,” who she claimed had walked in front of the players. The comment seemed truly bizarre, and I was even more surprised when a few others confirmed the woman’s account.

Mahzarin then replayed the video. Sure enough, there was a woman who clearly walked through the group of basketball players carrying an open umbrella. She is very easy to spot if you aren’t preoccupied with counting passes. (If you watched the video and don’t believe she was there, look again.) There are many variations of this video (in the most famous version, a person in a gorilla suit replaces the woman with the umbrella), and psychologists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons have even written a book entitled The Invisible Gorilla that features their fine work on the gorilla version of this task.

My failure to see the woman with the umbrella was common (somewhere between 79 and 97 percent of audience members do not see her) and now easily explained by the psychological literature, yet I still found it amazing. When I show this video in classrooms, my students, like me, focus on counting and generally miss this very obvious information in their visual world. Years after I saw the video for the first time, I remain obsessed by my failure to see the woman with the umbrella, and this obsession has organized my research and teaching over the past decade.

Of course, my success in life does not depend on seeing women with umbrellas in trick problems. A carefully developed ability to focus is more useful than not. Yet I wondered, is there a price to this focus? Beyond the realm of visual tricks, does focusing inhibit our ability to notice critical information? After we have learned to spot the umbrella or gorilla, isn’t there something more to be learned, namely the habit of spotting all (or at least more) of the metaphorical umbrellas and gorillas?

These questions lead to the third episode in my life that crystallized my thinking about noticing. In 2005 a Fortune 20 company hired me to create a course on decision making and negotiation in diplomatic contexts for the firm’s top seventy-five executives. The class was run in small groups, about fifteen executives per session. We built it around case studies of specific challenges my client had faced involving complex negotiations in the recent past. In the hour before the start of the first session, I was introduced to three distinguished-looking individuals who were referred to as my “special advisers”; I was told that they had expertise I could draw on during the class. I was confused, so I asked one of the senior staff members who had been involved in creating the course with me to explain what was going on. I learned that two of the three advisers were former ambassadors who had served in the country where the corporation was located and in the countries represented in the case studies that we would be analyzing. The third was an extremely high-level former intelligence official. I remember thinking that this would have been good information to know before the class was about to begin.

Making matters more complex, during...