The Invisible Gorilla.

The Invisible Gorilla is a study that was conducted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

In the study, participants are asked to look at a screen and watch a basketball game between a team wearing white jerseys and a team wearing black jerseys.

The goal is for the participants to count the number of passes made by the players in the white jerseys.

In the middle of the game, a person wearing a gorilla suit shows up at the court among the players, thumps their chest and walks away.

A big percentage of the participants fail to see the gorilla.

When they are reporting on the number of passes made, they are asked about the gorilla. "Did you see a big black gorilla?"

They all respond with a look that seems to question the researcher's sanity. "What gorilla?"

The study shows that focusing on a goal narrows your focus so much that your peripheral vision is inhibited. When the participants focus was on counting the passes made by the team in white, the players in black did not matter to them. The gorilla in black easily blends with the black team and goes unnoticed.

This has implications in business and in life in general.

When you're keenly observing for a particular outcome, you fail to see much else or ignore whatever else is presented to you.

This is good as far as achieving the goal is concerned but it might hurt long term growth. It may lead to missing out on useful information that may be lurking under the surface.

When analyzing data, we pick the data points that are aligned or clustered. We believe that they present more potential for revealing patterns. We ignore the outliers. To us, the outlier seems misplaced.

The outlier data point is like the invisible gorilla. You can't see it when all your attention is directed to the clustering data points.

There's an interesting story around Viagra that I heard from Rory Sutherland.

When Viagra was originally being tested as a drug for the heart, they observed something unusual: As is standard practice, the pills left over during clinicals trial are returned to the clinic by the test subjects. Unexpectedly, most of the Viagra left over pills were not being returned.

This was an unusual occurrence, but it was not useful data. All the attention was on the effects of the drug on the heart. That was the goal of the study.

Fortunately, somebody saw the outlier data point. Somebody saw the gorilla and pointed it out. The discovery of why the pills were not returned is how attention was directed to the useful side effects of the drug. Manufacturing of Viagra would later be one of the company's major activities but not for the reasons Viagra had been originally intended for.

This is also how most of the elements on the periodic table ended up there. Alchemists devoted to the conversion of base elements into gold, happened upon many other elements that they had no interest with. It is by virtue of their curiosity that these elements were discovered and not ignored. They exploited the known and explored the unknown with equal enthusiasm.

Let's approach our goals with an open eye and an open mind. It is the only way to see the gorilla.