Each time Mal "Skip" Bowen sat on his favorite beach, he noticed people diving for abalone a short distance offshore. When he set out to find one himself he bought gear, headed back to the beach, and went into the water. No abalone. Not a single one. He wondered if the tide had changed while he was gone or if someone else caught them all.
Just then a diver strolled by with a large catch. Skip tried again, returning empty handed. He wondered if he needed to wait until seagulls circled or waves reached a certain height when a diver who looked 100 years old, who was perhaps 42, walked by with even more abalone. Skip asked what he might be doing wrong.
The leathery-looking diver spit out a piece of kelp. "There's something you should know about abalone." He paused, nodding back toward the ocean. "Until you see your first abalone, you can't see them at all. Once you see your first one, they're everywhere."
Skip grabbed his mask and fins, and headed toward the water. About an hour later, he saw his first abalone. He's been seeing them everywhere since.
The human eye has a blind spot in its field of vision. The human mind has something similar. Sometimes you can't "see" new information because you are bound by filters and lack the mental framework to make sense of what your eyes take in. People often see what they want to see and ignore information that doesn't fit their preconceptions. We default to the shortcut of seeing things the same way. People seek stability and security so seeing things in a way that confirms their beliefs gives them both.
Help yourself see more by looking past your beliefs.
To manage an overwhelming amount of data, you create mental category bins where you group similar items. "I don't need to spend time discovering the nuances of this grub because I know enough about bugs to get by," explain Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe explain in Managing the Unexpected. But this can be dangerous: "Trouble starts when I fail to notice that I see only whatever confirms my categories and expectations but nothing else. The trouble deepens even further if I kid myself that seeing is believing. That's wrong. It's the other way around. You see what you expect to see. You see what you have the labels to see. You see what you have the skills to manage." After all, that grub might need to go into a bucket labeled food if you're hungry and lost in the woods.
Few people feel comfortable pointing out they're missing little details it seems everyone else knows. At the beginning of any class I teach, I ask everyone to fold a paper airplane and fly it forward if there is a term, acronym, or concept we talk about that they're unfamiliar with. We're more likely to focus on the airborne plane, making sure to spend time clarifying recent topics, than considering who sent it. It signifies that we need to pay more attention to the words we use so that they make sense to everyone and allow everyone to advocate for themselves in a non-threatening way.
Assumptions are beliefs about how the world works. They include priorities, lists of what you value more than other things. Over time your assumptions work at an unconscious level, helping you work without constantly determining what you should or ought to act. Similar to the dangers of categorization, the cost for this efficiency is you may fail to notice new evidence contradicting your unsaid beliefs and missing opportunities to update your views of the world. The great philosopher Douglas Adams wrote, "A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting."
When introduced to a new concept, do you ever think, "Should I know how to use this or know what to do next?" This happens when you don't have the structure on which to set the new information down upon. You don't know how it connects to ideas you're already familiar with, that you already rely on, or have previously made your own. To acquire necessary mental furniture seek associations, metaphors, illustrations, or stories so you can see how this new stuff works with what you know. This past week, two different clients asked me to create an image showing all the steps we would take for their projects. The picture didn't matter to their concrete styles of thinking as much as their newfound confidence that we had a full-plan, allowing them to see we could proceed.
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