Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business starts with knowing ourselves.
Hi founders,
We all have a routine and a set of numbers we obsess over, whether sales, marketing or retention data. We get better at reading the data and think we have no blind spots.
Research on attention suggests we shouldn't be so sure.
Do you remember that viral invisible gorilla video from 14 years ago?
It's footage from 1999 of a few people passing a basketball, with one instruction: count how many times the team in white passes the ball.
Partway through, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the scene, thumps their chest and walks off.
In the original 1999 study, about half the viewers never saw the gorilla.
Psychologists call this inattentional blindness: when we focus hard on one thing, we can miss something obvious right in front of us.
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The gorilla in the lung scan
In the gorilla study, the participants were students who watched the video and counted the passes, a task they had never trained for. In 2013, Trafton Drew, Melissa Võ and Jeremy Wolfe at Harvard Medical School tested the same effect on experts doing the work they do every day.
They asked 24 radiologists to search five lung CT scans for nodules, the small light circles that can be an early sign of lung cancer. Each scan is a stack of hundreds of image slices. The radiologists scrolled through each one for up to three minutes and clicked on every nodule they found. The task was hard even for experts, and on average they found 55% of the nodules.
In the final scan, the researchers placed a picture of a gorilla inside the lung. It was 48 times the size of an average nodule, about the size of a matchbox, and it sat right next to a nodule. After the last case, they asked each radiologist three questions. Did this case seem different from the others? Did you notice anything unusual? Did you see a gorilla?
Twenty of the 24 radiologists, 83%, didn't report the gorilla. When the researchers showed them the slice afterwards, every one of them could see it. Eye-tracking showed that 12 of the 20 who missed it had looked directly at the gorilla, for about half a second on average.
People with no medical training did the same task after a short lesson on finding nodules, and none of them reported the gorilla. In a separate check, people who were told where to look spotted it 88% of the time, even when it was on screen for less than a fifth of a second.
Why we can't see everything
Consciousness is not binary, all on or all off. We can't be conscious of everything at once. The thalamus (the brain's relay station for incoming sensory information) is constantly fed all sorts of information, and it helps decide what reaches our awareness.
For example, you're probably not aware of your left little toe most of the time. Now you are, because you brought your attention to it.
When we focus hard on one task, the selection becomes stricter. Our brain registers the information we intend to focus on and filters out the rest, even when it is large and right in front of us.
The gorilla in our dashboard
As founders, we look at the same few numbers every day: revenue, retention, and our roadmap. Like the radiologists, the more time we spend with them, the better we get at reading them. But the sharper our focus on one thing, the more likely everything else is to go unseen.
These are the questions worth asking ourselves:
Are we looking straight at the problem?
Twelve of the radiologists who missed the gorilla had looked directly at it. In a business, the warning sign is often already in a report we read. We saw the information, but because we weren't searching for it, it never registered as a problem.
Are we only catching problems that look like the ones we track?
The gorilla looked nothing like the small, light circles the radiologists were searching for.
The same goes for our business: if we track monthly revenue, a drop in revenue gets our attention within days. Problems that come in a different form take much longer: a key team member stops speaking up in meetings, or a supplier delivers a day late each month. These problems can be just as important, but we don’t notice them until they hurt cash flow.
Are our blind spots becoming the team’s too?
In the study, the researchers set the radiologists' search. In a company, we set the task, so our blind spot can become the company's blind spot.
So, what’s the invisible gorilla in your business?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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