NAVIGATING BLINDSPOTS.

Every leader has a blindspot, and most of us have more than one. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Noble Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, observes that every person "can be blind to the obvious." But more significantly (especially for leaders) "we are also blind to our blindness." In other words, dangerously (as in merging into a lane with a car in our blindspot), we don't even know or realize what we are missing. Kahneman's assertion of these two facts of human psychology emerges from a study offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book, The Invisible Gorilla. (Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen the experiment, look it up on YouTube before you read the rest of this). In their study they constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white t-shirts, the other wearing black t-shirts. Video viewers (originally the study participants) were instructed to count the number of passes made by the team with white shirts, ignoring the players wearing black shirts. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears for 9 seconds, crossing the court, thumping her chest, and then moving on. Based on the study (and now hundreds of thousands of video viewers), statistically, only about half of the people watching the video notice anything unusual. Effective leader's cultivate strong teams because, although everyone has a blindspot, chances are yours is different than mine. Ensuring the right people are in the right positions and dialoguing about the right things is critical to sustained success. By analogy, the brain can't do the what heart can do, nor can the heart do what the kidneys or liver can do, but together there is wholeness and effective functioning. Leadership humility is the recognition that if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. #TeamingReducesBlindspots

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