Do you have inattentional blindness? Check here

When you are so intensely focused on the signals you are looking for, you are liable to miss the other signs. How does one recognise this and avoid it?
For representational purposes
For representational purposes

Great leaders accept blame and pass along credit to colleagues. The less-than-great take credit and blame others—predecessors, coworkers and alleged enemies. They insult their own team, who must deliver results. Former US president Donald Trump is a prime example and there are many closer to home.

I reviewed three transformation risks—demyelination risk (28 January 2021), subsonic sounds (25 February 2021) and capacity for change (26 March 2021). In this article, I focus on inattentional blindness due to one of two obsessions: predetermined signals or self-obsession. It occurs when you are so intensely focused on the signals you are looking for that you miss the others. It could also be because of self-obsession; for example, Adolf Hitler, who was singularly obsessed with expanding lebensraum while enhancing his personal image through dress and highly practised demagoguery.

In a 1999 university experiment, respondents were asked to count the number of times the ball changed hands during the replay of a basketball match. Amidst the frames, significant nine-second interruptions were interposed of a big gorilla thumping his chest. Many observers completely missed the multiple appearances of the gorilla since their brain was focused on the assigned task of counting the exchanges of the ball.

Motorola made the first cell phones. Company leaders were so focused on existing telecom customers that they completely missed the ‘gorilla’ of their customers’ customers. Nokia took the market by storm. Later Nokia too lost its lead because of its inattentional blindness to further technological developments.

Allaudin Mohammed II of Samarkand had conquered vast lands in Central Asia by 1217. However, Baghdad’s Caliph An-Nasir rejected his claim to be Shah. Allaudin Mohammed was enraged. He became obsessed with the intransigence of the Caliph. When Mongol Genghis Khan looked to open trade relations with the Shah’s territories, driven by his ego and unrelatedly furious at the recalcitrant Caliph, the Shah rebuffed the Mongols. Trying to maintain diplomacy, Genghis sent three men as peacemakers. The Shah executed the envoys and the Mongols were enraged. Genghis sacked the Shah’s cities with a revenge that was considered brutal even by the very vicious Mongol standards.

To my mind, the history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) illustrates how strong technological professionals missed the signals of a very different environment when danger was emanating from non-technology sources. ICI was a fantastic company of technical people. It had developed and owned more than 33,000 patents. The flip side was that its leaders treated the securities markets with disdain. In 1991, the Hanson Group, through its merchant bank, Smith New Court, bought a £240 million, 2.8% stake in it. ICI was caught in inattentional blindness thereafter, before descending into a long decline. ICI, now part of Akzo Nobel, is a pale force in world business.

The South Indian tea plantation industry provides another example. India had for long been the world’s largest tea producer and exporter. Sri Lanka was a much smaller producer, but gradually became a major exporter since its domestic market was small. South Indian teas and Sri Lankan teas had some similarity in tea types and quality. From the 1970s, Russia became a major buyer of South Indian teas under the rupee/rouble trade agreement.

The Russians bought humongous quantities at unrealistic prices because it was a managed trade, not a free trade. The South Indian industry lost its focus on quality and chased production volume blindly. The labour unions and the state governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu also insisted that the wages and amenities for plantation workers be increased rapidly. This continued until the early 90s when, with economic liberalisation, it started to become obvious that South Indian teas would soon be outclassed in quality as well as in price. The industry had suffered from inattentional blindness and it took a decade of decline before plantation companies started to address the core issues at hand.

Anyone can self-test personal inattentional blindness as a leader by reflecting on six questions: 
i. Do I feel that many people are out to block my initiatives and dynamism?
ii. Do people fawn over me?
iii. Do my colleagues feel free to offer different views or express a contrarian view?
iv. Do I feel a bit cutoff from people and hence, from reality?
v. Have I made special efforts to connect with the far parts of my organisation?
vi. When I do connect, does my visit appear stage-managed?  

The answers offer the tell-tale signals. Blaming past leaders and imaginary enemies is a sign of incompetence and insecurity, a typical response being rhetoric and rabble-rousing. Such people are open to inattentional blindness.

 R Gopalakrishnan

Author and corporate advisor

(The author had served as Director, Tata Sons and, before that, as Vice Chairman, Hindustan Unilever. Collaborating with entrepreneur-cum-angel investor R Narayanan, he has recently co-authored a book titled “Wisdom for start-ups from grownups”)

(rgopal@themindworks.me)

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