September 28th, 2009
Blind Spots
The danger of what you don’t know you don’t know.
There is a lot of stuff I do not know. A lot. All that stuff that I do not know can be broken into two basic categories.
- the stuff that I know I don’t know
- the stuff that I don’t know I don’t know
The distinction is important. The stuff that I know I don’t know represents very little danger to me or others. An example of this might be:
I do not know how to fly a space shuttle. I know, that I do not know how to fly a space shuttle. Because I am aware of it, that lack of knowledge is of little danger…if NASA got needy and called to ask if I would pilot the next space shuttle, I could simply reply “sorry, I do not know anything about flying a space shuttle”, and everyone could go on safely with their lives. If I did not know, that I did not know how to fly a space shuttle it might be very dangerous as I might accept that invitation.
The stuff that I do not know that I do not know can be much more dangerous for us because these are gaps in our knowledge or awareness that we are not aware of…holes in the road that we cannot see, and we cannot adjust our behavior accordingly. Our lives are full of these gaps, these blind spots, both in our understanding of people and situations and our eye sight.
We probably all assume that what we see is pretty much what our eyes see and report to your brain. Actually… our brains add a great deal of info to the information that comes from our eyes. A lot of what we see is actually “made up” by our brains.
A blind spot, also known as a scotoma, is an obscuration of your vision field that we all have due to the fact that there is a portion of the retina that the optic nerve passes through and it s not sensitive to light. You can experiment with your blind spot using these exercises.
The truly important thing to keep in mind about this blind spot is that we do not see that we do not see…we do not walk around with a “hole” in our vision…we must go out of our way to actually see the impact of the blind spot.
The same is true regarding our understanding of the people that we interact with, especially those that we work with. We make a lot of decisions about people:
- who to trust
- who not to trust
- who to share information withwho to hire
- who to promote
When we make these decisions we generally feel like we are basing them on a lot of knowledge. We are much less aware of all the stuff that we do not know. Part of the reason for this is that our brain tends to automatically brush over those blind spots with assumptions.
It is just part of human nature that we make assumptions and a lot of them are right…but some of them are wrong, and if we are not good at catching the ones that are wrong they can get us in a lot of trouble. The incorrect assumption that we accept as knowledge / fact / truth can be very dangerous to us and to our organizations.
Assumptions about people are often based on stereotypical ideas and images and can easily sabotage our decision making and evaluation of people and limiting our potential for hiring and retaining the best and brightest.
We all have blind spots. What do you do to look for and challenge assumptions?
Be good to each other.
I enjoyed this insightful post. Well worth the visit =)
I spend about 15 minutes each day brainstorming ideas on how to improve or streamline one aspect of one facet of my life. (meaning one very small part) I then try to implement whatever the idea turns out to be within a 10 day timeframe.
It sounds complicated (and it was, at first) but getting into the habit helped me to fix those gaps in my knowledge, vision, lifestyle or work function.
Great article! You are so right that it is "just part of human nature that we make assumptions". I would say: the blind spots are there for a reason! Your fear is that "if we are not good at catching the ones that are wrong they can get us in a lot of trouble". That is positioning the chance to learn, which is basically life’s produce to us, as a negative. I assume(!) that your fear is really for learning, not for trouble… Coping with this fear-of-life-as-a-teacher is best done by accepting #1 our human nature to assume and thus err and #2 the correcting power of life, of nature, for us to gain knowledge in spite of us erring. Now lets get back to life-as-an-adventure again, and enjoy and love it!