The Power of NoticingWhat the best leaders see

Max bazerman

Max Bazerman is the co director for Public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy school and the Strauss professor at the Harvard Business school

Terrible things happen when our leaders fail to think about data that are outside their typical focus.

We are generally more affected by biases and that forces us to think wrong.

‘What do I wish I knew’ and ‘what additional information would help me to an informed decision’ are two questions every leader should ask.

We limit our analysis to what is easily available rather than asking what data would best answer the question.

People can miss seeing the obvious visually, this is called inattentional blindness.

Noticing information that others do not often involves breaking boundaries, rules and barriers that need to be broken

When we have a vested self interest, we get to a bias and hence we cannot take the right decision

Leaders do not notice when they are obsessed with other issues, and other people work hard to keep them from noticing

Leadership comes with responsibilities. A critical one is noticing the outlying evidence. It is the job of the leader to ask for the information that’s not in the room.

Trust, cynicism or thinking one step ahead? It depends on whether you want to trust or be cynical, this depends on how you see one step ahead.

Your goal as a leader should be to understand the strategic behavior of others without destroying opportunities or trust building.

One skill of successful leaders is that they prevent predictable surprises.

A predictable surprise occurs when the organization has all the information needed but leaders fail to act and prevent the inevitable.

Acting to prevent predictable surprises :a. Recognize the threatprioritize the threatc. Mobilize action

The most important leadership trait is to be a ‘first class noticer’.

A first class noticer is someone with a good eye for ‘human behavior’. First class noticers are intensely attentive, they recognize talent and see what others miss.

Try to remember a crisis that surprised you or your organization. Most predictable response would be ‘ why didn’t we see that coming?’

Your response to a surprise would be

• No one could have predicted it• The odds of this happening were so low that it

didn’t seem worthy of attention• It wasn’t my job to read the warning signals• There are so many possible crisis at any point,

that we missed it.

Your response should have been

• I didn’t examine the threats confronting our company

• I didn’t think about how other parties could affect our organization

• I didn’t ask others what data we were missing• I didn’t search hard enough for more options

for us to consider

Noticing is easy for outsiders to your system

Insiders tend to view a situation as unique while outsiders present a more balanced, generalized view.

Organizations institute systems that promote what their employees notice.

Employees often have the power to notice but are constrained by the culture to speak up.