Last month, I ran a Rethinking Data workshop in Warsaw Poland. Based on prior experiences in Eastern Europe, I was concerned that I might have trouble pronouncing people’s names. Getting people’s names right is really important to me.  So, as the workshop approached, that concern grew to anxiety.

When I arrived at the workshop, a quick scan of the name tents confirmed my fear:

• Burak
• Koziel
• Bugaj
• Zygmunt
• Kwasnik
• Zientara
• Kozyra
• etc.

Just as I expected.  I was going to stumble through the names possibly embarrassing myself or the person to whom I was speaking.  About an hour into the workshop, I heard one of the participants refer to his friend by the name “Mary”.  I thought to myself, “There’s no Mary.  I must have heard him wrong.”  Then he said it again. I looked over to see who was going to respond.  That’s when I noticed her full name tent, “Bugaj, Mary”.  It turned out that all of the name tents listed the last name followed by the first name of the participant.  How did I not see something that was right in front of me?

I fell victim to what Dan Simons and Chris Chabris call inattentional blindness.  The most famous example of inattentional blindness is their video of the gorilla that walks through a group of people passing basketballs.  About half of the people who watch the video miss the gorilla if they are told to count the number of passes by one team.

Our conscious brain is limited in the amount of data it can handle at one time.  As a result, our brains developed so that incoming data goes first to the unconscious part of the brain.  The data is filtered, sorted, and “made sense of” and then a small subset is sent to the conscious part of our brain.  That is what forms our conscious awareness and perception (side note:  Simons and Chabris discovered that everyone “sees” the gorilla. However, only half of us become consciously aware of it).

Although the unconscious part of our brain is quite efficient at handling a lot of data, it’s not always effective. To conserve energy and processing power, it takes a lot of short cuts. One short cut is to seek data that fits our expectations and past experiences.  After all, it’s easier to process something that you already know.  So once your unconscious brain finds a few data points that “confirm” that the new situation is like the old or expected situation, it stops looking (aka confirmation bias).  It happens both ways.  We see what we expect and ignore what we don’t expect. People miss the gorilla because they didn’t expect it during the video.  As a result, the unconscious brain filters it out.  In my case, I expected the names to be hard to pronounce.  Once the unconscious part of my brain had confirming data (the last names) that the names were unusual, it ignored the additional, contradictory data (the first names).  It never even occurred to me that I might be looking at last names.  Have you ever been a situation where you’ve looked at some data that confirmed what you thought to be true (about your top performers or top products) and then had someone else point out a contradictory “obvious” data point that you overlooked?

Had the event organizers only listed the first names on the tent, I would not have made this mistake.  This is a common problem when it comes to data.  We often provide too much.  Instead of providing what is relevant to an action or decision, we provide everything. As a presenter I only needed the first names. The participants also only needed the first names (and possibly the first letter of the last name) if they were using the name tents to find their seats.  No one needed both names. However, since that data was available it was provided. And since it was provided, my unconscious brain used it and missed the relevant data.  Availability should never be a criteria for what data get displayed. I’ve seen excel reports that have over 50 columns of data.  Clearly all of that isn’t necessary for the decision, but some of it may be unintentionally and unconsciously driving it.

You may be thinking that you are less flaky than me and would never miss something so obvious like the first name on a name tent.  That’s where you’ll get in trouble. Researchers like Simons, Chabris, and others have proven time and time again that we all fall victim to the unconscious tricks that our brains use.  Yet, we still tend to be over-confident in our conscious abilities.  That’s why we tend to look at or show too much data. We believe, incorrectly, that we can focus and filter consciously.  That’s simply not the case.

We can’t stop our unconscious brains from playing fast and loose with the data.  However, we can minimize its ability by providing less data from the start.

Keep your data focused and controlled.  Determine what is relevant to the decision being made.  Then, only provide that data.  Showing less will speed up and improve your decision making.