Blind to our Blindness

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." - Helen Keller

Everyday we go about our daily lives, making thousands of decisions based upon our own understanding of the world around us. We are capable of picking out information and basing our decisions upon those things we've learned through both experience and perception. Our minds are able to focus so intently that we are able to take complex and high stress situations and extract information needed to perform our daily tasks.

Before you read further, watch the video below and make sure to pay close attention when counting the passes completed by those in the white shirts. Remember your count and see how your ability to track and count these passes compares to others.

Did you get the correct answer?

More importantly, did you see the gorilla enter the video? If you were not familiar with the selective attention test it is likely that you did not - a study by Harvard University found that half of viewers were oblivious to the gorilla that enters the video for a full 9 seconds before leaving. What does this tell us about our own cognitive ability and our ability to see the world?

It is likely that we miss out on the majority of things happening around us, especially during times of high focus and attention. A main problem with this is that it is during high pressure times that we need to have the ability to see the broad picture to identify risks, challenges and incomplete thinking that can lead us down perilous paths - we are unable to see the forest through the trees.

The world continues to go through immense changes and we must be able to expand our vision and understanding, or at the very least acknowledge our own biases and limitations. A global pandemic has exposed various oversights in our supply chains and revealed threats and vulnerabilities. Long-standing racial inequalities are being brought to light and demanding much needed change. The political landscape is fragmented, hostile and divisive.

In order to see the world with more clarity, we must close our eyes and allow ourselves to try see the world through the eyes of others. Let us each identify and focus on our own weakness, which is the inability to see everything with 100 percent clarity. To build resiliency and harmony we must remove barriers to diversity and purposefully seek out differing ideologies and ways of thinking. We must be open to dialogue that challenges our own long held beliefs and be humble and willing to accept our own fallacies in order to move forward in a positive direction.