The other morning, I was out of town getting ready for a workshop.  My clear, quart-sized, TSA compliant “liquids” bag was on the counter.  I glanced inside the bag for my shaving cream.  It wasn’t there.  “That’s strange”, I thought to myself, “I know that I just bought a new can after my last trip.”  I checked the bag again. No luck.  I began looking around the hotel bathroom for some soap or body lotion to use instead.  Finally, convinced that I must be missing something, I checked my bag a third time.  There, before my eyes, taking up about a third of the bag, was my shaving cream (orange cap).

How could I have not seen that?  Not only was it right in front of me, it was the largest item in the bag.  The answer lies in one of the most popular psychology videos of all time, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons’, “Gorillas in the Midst” (or its updated version “Monkey Business”).  If you haven’t seen this video yet, click on the link before proceeding.

 

In the Gorillas in the Midst experiment, participants were given a simple task.  They had to count the number of times one team passed a ball among one another.  About midway through the video a woman in a gorilla costume walks in from the right, stops in the center and beats her chest, then then exists left.

 

Around fifty to sixty percent of the people who watch this video say that they do not see the gorilla.  However, they actually do!  Everybody does.  Eye tracking experiments show that people who watch the video look directly at the gorilla, on average, for one second[1]. It’s not that half of the people don’t see it.  They just don’t become aware of it.  In other words, it doesn’t make it from their unconscious brain (where all data starts) to their conscious brain.

 

So, why do people miss it?  Most people assume that it is because we are so focused on counting.  That’s partially true although it’s not as simple as that.  It’s not about our conscious focus.  It’s about how the unconscious part of our brain (over which we have little control) decides what to pass along to the conscious part.  According to Simons and Chabris

 

“When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.”[2]

 

Recognizing this second factor is really important to good decision making.  Most of us are over confident when it comes to our brains.  We tend to believe that we are more in control, more objective, and more focused than we are.  The reality is that most of how we interpret the world is happening unconsciously.

 

So why did I miss the shaving cream?  I was certainly expecting to see it.  I even remembered buying it. I was completely expecting to see it in my bag.

 

The problem was that I wasn’t expecting to see THAT shaving cream.  That last time I shopped, they didn’t have my usual brand.  My regular brand has a red cap and is about ½ the diameter of the can that I purchased.

I expected to see a smaller red cap, not a large orange cap. I saw the orange cap but my unconscious brain dismissed it as not relevant to my search for shaving cream.

 

What does this have to do with data-driven decision making?

 

• We aren’t as good at focusing as we think. It’s easy it is to miss something that is right in front of you.

 

• Our beliefs often influence what we see more than what we see influences out beliefs.

 

• It doesn’t take much information to confuse your brain. Look back at my bag of toiletries.  There were only three main objects showing.  I missed one of them (the biggest).  What do you think happens when you look at a report with twenty-five rows and ten columns (250 data points).

 

• Color coding your reports may not be providing as much focus or insight as you think. If you expect a KPI to be colored green, you might not notice it when it is colored red.

 

Having a lot of data is not the same as showing at a lot of data.  It’s important to have a robust data set driving your decisions.  However, the more data you put in front of someone (including yourself), the more he or she (or you) are likely to miss.  Work to reduce the amount of information you are looking at or presenting at one time.

 

Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors.  Avail’s Rethinking Data workshop will help you organize, communicate, and use data in a more focused, streamlined manner.  Check us out at www.availadvisors.com/rethinkingdata.

 

[1] D. Memmert, “The Effects of Eye Movement, Age, and Expertise on Inattentional Blindness,” Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006): 620-627 reported in Chabris, Christopher F., and Daniel J. Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown, 2010. Chapter 1

[2] Chabris, Christopher F., and Daniel J. Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown, 2010. Chapter 1.