How External Perspective Prevents Expensive Blind Spots

Research & Sources / Mentorship & Sounding Boards

Every car has a blind spot: a place just behind your shoulder where another car can hide from all your mirrors. Good drivers know this and turn their head before changing lanes. Drivers who forget it usually learn about it with a loud bang. Leaders have blind spots too. The expensive ones are those nobody checks.

Everyone has them

Blind spots are not a sign of a bad leader. They are built into how humans think. Emily Pronin and colleagues showed that people see biases in others easily but rate themselves as far less biased, and stay convinced even after the bias is explained to them.¹

Tasha Eurich’s research suggests that about 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, while only about 10 to 15 percent actually are.² Most of us think our mirrors cover everything.

Expensive blind spots in business

• The favourite project that has quietly been losing money for two years.
• The key person everyone knows is struggling, except the boss.
• The market change that the team talks about over lunch but never in meetings.
• The leader’s own habit, like interrupting or deciding too late, that slows everything down.

These cost real money. And they often stay hidden for years, because nobody inside has a strong reason to point them out.

Process beats good intentions

Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony studied more than 1,000 business decisions and found that a good decision process, including openly discussing uncertainties and hearing opposing views, mattered about six times more for the outcome than the quality of the analysis.³

In other words, the solution is not to try harder to see everything yourself. It is to install mirrors: routines and people that show you what you cannot see.

Mirrors worth installing

An outside thinking partner. Someone with no stake in your answers, who asks the questions insiders avoid.

A premortem before big decisions. Imagine it failed, and ask why.⁴

Regular feedback on yourself. Ask a few people: “What is one thing I do that gets in the way?”

Customer conversations. Customers see your business from outside every day.

Numbers you would rather not see. Profit per client, per product, per project. They often show what feelings hide.

What this means for you this week

• Ask two people what they think you are not seeing in the business right now.
• Look at profit per client or per product for the first time in a while.
• Run a short premortem on your next big decision.
• Write down one blind spot you discovered and one action to fix it.

Turn your head before you change lanes. It takes one second and saves a lot of damage.

Sources

1. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y. & Ross, L. (2002). The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381. doi.orgPeople see biases in others far more easily than in themselves.
2. Eurich, T. (2018). What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It). Harvard Business Review. hbr.orgAbout 95 percent of people think they are self-aware, an estimated 10 to 15 percent are; “what” questions help more than “why” questions.
3. Lovallo, D. & Sibony, O. (2010). The case for behavioral strategy. McKinsey Quarterly. mckinsey.comStudy of more than 1,000 major business decisions: the quality of the decision process mattered about six times more than the quality of the analysis.
4. Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review. hbr.orgImagining that a project has already failed and asking why helps teams find risks they would otherwise miss.