The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

THE DISCIPLINE OF PATTERN RECOGNITION

common traps. Failing to recognize fundamental cognitive limi tations is one such pitfall. You cannot hope to sense and respond to every significant development impacting on your business. We all have a limited capacity for attention and focusing too intensely on one task can render you blind, in essence, to things that would typically draw your gaze. A classic illustration of this is “The Invisible Gorilla,” an experiment run by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They asked students on a psychology course at Harvard Univer sity to watch a video and count how many times the players passed a basketball. More than half the participants were com pletely oblivious to a person walking through the game in a gorilla suit, pounding their chest. Even after the students were told about the gorilla, with the benefit of hindsight, they could not recall it. 7 Their minds focused on the activity they were told was critical, leaving little spare capacity to spot even a very novel stimulus. It’s a legacy of evolutionary biology that we prioritize the gravest threats and most promising opportunities to boost our chances of survival. In business, focus enables leaders to concen trate on critical tasks without becoming overwhelmed by an abundance of stimuli. But it comes packaged with potential downsides, especially as the world becomes more complicated and confusing. The implication, paradoxically, is to be wary about the pit falls of selective attention. If you can take some time to assess and reflect, you’ll be better able to detect the patterns that matter and not get distracted by shiny objects. Like most execu tives, you probably face increasing demands on your time, and ever more complex challenges as technological, social and ecological

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