HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL
Noticing: A Leadership Challenge
MLD 328M
January 5-9, 2015
Max H. Bazerman
Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, HBS
Co-Director, Center for Public Leadership, HKS
Syllabus
Offices: HKS, Center for Public Leadership; HBS, Bloomberg Center 453
Email:
Tel: 617-495-6429
Teaching/Faculty Assistants: Lisa Eschenbach,
Max’s Odyssey on Noticing
(adapted from the preface of The Power of Noticing)
In the days after 9/11, I woke abruptly during the night with an image of the second airplane veering into the second tower. This was strange for me. I normally sleep very well, rarely remember my dreams, and the stressors of life rarely disrupt my rest. Now I was waking up with the same frightening image many nights in a row. I couldn’t fall back to sleep—again, rare for me. So, I gave up, headed to my home office in the wee hours, and started to think about what social scientists like me know about what had just happened to the United States. After a few nights of this pattern, I had a vague notion that 9/11 should have been anticipated—and prevented. Here are the core pieces of evidence I jotted down during those early mornings:
· The U.S. government knew that terrorists were willing to become martyrs for their cause, and that their hatred toward the United States was increasing.
· In 1993, terrorists had previously bombed the World Trade Center.
· In 1994, terrorists hijacked an Air France airplane and made an aborted attempt to turn the airplane into a missile aimed at the Eiffel Tower.
· Also in 1994, terrorists attempted to simultaneously hijack 12 U.S. commercial airplanes in Asia.
· Airline passengers knew how easy it was to board an airplane with items, such as small knives, that could be used as weapons.
Soon after collecting these thoughts, Michael Watkins, then my Harvard Business School colleague, and I started working on our book, “Predictable Surprises.” This work focused on how individuals and organizations can learn to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize action to avoid serious predictable surprises. In a chapter of our book that analyzed 9/11 as a predictable surprise, we anticipated the eventual conclusion of the 9/11 Bipartisan Commission: “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.”
Two other episodes drove home the truisms that all of us are prone to miss essential facts and that the benefits of widening our area of focus can be profound. First, in 2003, I attended a talk by another Harvard colleague, Mahzarin Banaji, where she showed a video—which you may have seen—made by psychologist Ulric Neisser in the 1970s. Before starting the 18-second video, Mahzarin told the audience that they would see two visually superimposed groups of three players passing basketballs in the video. One trio wore white shirts, and the other trio wore dark shirts. Our task was to count the number of passes made among the trio wearing white shirts. The dual video, as well as the grainy nature of the film, made the task moderately complex. If you have never seen this video, watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcjnJ1B7N0E, and count the passes among the players in the white t-shirts before reading further.
I counted the passes among the players with the white T-shirts, feeling confident. I am pretty good at focusing. When Mahzarin confirmed that the number of passes was 11, the same number I had counted, I felt proud, mentally patting myself on the back. Then she asked the audience of a few hundred if they had seen anything unusual in the video. One woman in the back of the room mentioned “a woman with an umbrella,” who she claimed had walked in front of the players. To me, the comment seemed truly bizarre, and I was even more surprised when a few others confirmed the woman’s account.
Mahzarin then replayed the video. Sure enough, there was a woman who clearly walked through the basketball court carrying an open umbrella. She is very easy to spot if you aren’t preoccupied with counting passes. There are many variations of this video (in the most famous version, a person in a gorilla suit replaces the woman with the umbrella), and psychologists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons have even written a book entitled The Invisible Gorilla that features their fine work on the “gorilla version” of this task.
My failure to see the woman with the umbrella was common (somewhere between 79-97% of audiences do not see her) and now easily explained by the psychological literature, yet I still found it amazing. Years after I saw the video for the first time, I remain obsessed by my failure to see the woman with the umbrella, and this obsession has organized my research and teaching over the last decade.
Of course, my success in life does not depend on seeing women with umbrellas in trick problems. A carefully developed ability to focus is more useful than not. Yet I wondered, is there a price to this focus? Beyond the realm of visual tricks, does focusing inhibit our ability to notice critical information? After we have learned to spot the umbrella or gorilla, isn’t there something more to be learned, namely the habit of spotting all (or at least more) of the metaphorical umbrellas and gorillas?
These questions lead to the third episode in my life that crystallized my thinking about noticing. In 2005, a Fortune 20 company hired me to create a course on decision making and negotiation in diplomatic contexts for the firm’s top 75 executives. The class was run in small groups—about 15 executives per session. We built it around case studies of specific challenges my client had faced involving complex negotiations in the recent past. In the hour before the start of the first of the sessions, I was introduced to three distinguished-looking individuals who were referred to as my “special advisers”; I was told that they had expertise I could draw on during the class. I was confused, so I asked one of the senior staff members who had been involved in creating the course with me to explain what was going on. I learned that two of the three advisers were former ambassadors who had served for the country where the corporation was located, and in the countries represented in the case studies that we would be analyzing. The third was an extremely high-level former intelligence official. I remember thinking that this would have been good information to know before the class was about to begin.
Making matters seemingly more complex, as I started the class, the three diplomats seemed to feel quite free to interrupt me on a regular basis, which really wasn’t part of my plan. Even worse, their comments didn’t have much to do with where the class was headed, at least according to my vision. To be frank, my initial reaction to the diplomats was not positive. But as the first half-day of the program progressed, I began to develop a deep appreciation of the diplomats’ comments. They did make sense, I realized, and they did offer unique insight. I began to notice that what made their comments unique was that they tended to lie outside of not only the focus of the corporate executives, but also outside of my focus. These diplomats thought outside the box, by systematically removing the blinders that confronted the rest of us. Consistently, the executives and I were thinking one step ahead of the problem at hand and doing a fine job of working through the data that we defined as relevant. Meanwhile, the diplomats were thinking three or four steps ahead and, in the process, including more diverse data for consideration and developing interesting and important insights. They tended to think intuitively about how the results of negotiations with one country would affect the decisions and behavior of neighboring countries.
Recalling my failure to see the woman with the umbrella, I began to realize that I was really good at working with the data that was in front of me, at work and in other spheres of my life, but not so good at noticing additional information that would allow me to better achieve my real objectives. I ultimately recognized that the diplomats were capable of expanding their awareness beyond common bounds—a goal that might benefit all of us, and particularly benefit those charged with leading others to decisions and actions. In the process of teaching this course, I developed an appreciation of a new and different horizon point to my research. Are we capable of developing skills that can overcome the natural bounds of human awareness? Noticing is my attempt to answer this question affirmatively.
As the episodes that I’ve recounted suggest, this course is rooted in my own experience. It is about the failure to notice: a failure that leads to poor personal decisions, organizational crises, and societal disasters. Noticing will detail each of these, highlighting recent research developments in our awareness of information that people commonly ignore. Generalizing from my own experience and research over the last dozen years, I hope to create a blueprint that can help all of us notice critical information that we otherwise too easily ignore.
COURSE GRADING
I. Briefing Report (65% of final grade):
Briefing Report on Noticing
Your assignment is to produce a briefing report that provides useful insight to (a) decision maker(s) on how to create an organization that does a better job of noticing. For this class, you are specifically asked to identify an organization, agency, government, etc. that should do a better a job of noticing than they currently achieve.
Your task is to form a group (3 to 7 members; that means 2 and 8 are not acceptable numbers) and identify a “client” (whether they agree to be your client or not). The executive summary of the briefing should make sure that the “client” understands what the briefing offers even if she is unable to read the entire briefing report. The rest of the brief provides a more in-depth analysis for the decision-maker who may actually act on your insights. Each group will do a short (3-5 minute) presentation on the brief on the last day of the class. 1 or 2 members from each group should be designated to deliver this presentation.
You will be graded on the usefulness of the report for your client. Some of the things that a useful briefing report might do would include:
1. Define the problem or challenge.
2. Analyze—do not merely present—the relevant evidence.
3. Generate alternative approaches to addressing the problem.
4. Develop a set of recommendations.
5. Suggest next steps and/or implementation of the findings or recommendations.
Checklist
Addressing the following is not required, but might be useful to consider to increase the likelihood that you are maximizing the usefulness of the report for your client.
1. What’s the quality of the Executive Summary? Are all of the crucial bases covered for the decision maker’s or legislator’s personal attention? Do the problem and solution address the decision maker’s immediate needs? If this is all the decision-maker were to read before entering into a policy discussion, testifying before a legislative committee, or moving forward on the issue, will she be adequately positioned?
2. Is the briefing report logically structured?
3. Are problems well specified from the perspective of the likely reader(s)? Has raw data been carefully selected and adequately interpreted for the decision-maker?
4. If applicable, is there a thoughtful discussion of political stakeholders and an analysis of political feasibility?
5. Are recommendations feasible, clear, and logically prioritized?
Example “clients”
1. Any organization that has key threats, challenges, or opportunities that it ignores, reducing the long-term effectiveness of the organization.
2. A government agency. Again, what are the key threats, challenges, or opportunities that it ignores, reducing their long-term effectiveness. Examples:
a. SEC: Not noticing the failure of auditor independence.
b. City government trying to stop gun violence
c. A Nudge unit identifying viable problems to address
d. Taxing agency: Not noticing how to increase honesty at virtually no costs
e. HR office: How to reduce gender discrimination in a manner that will improve organizational performance
3. Any security agency of the U.S. government: failure of 9/11
Briefing report is due on 1/19/15.
II. Class participation (25% of final grade):
A sizable portion of material covered in class will not appear in the readings. It is important, therefore, to attend and participate in each class. I expect that everyone will have something to contribute and I expect you to come to class prepared and engaged. I will evaluate your participation based on how well you know the material when called upon, how thoughtful your comments are in class, and how much effort you put into making the class work, e.g., by building on others’ comments when making a statement. Participation points often make the difference when grades fall in a border zone.
III. Noticing self-assessment (10% of final grade):
A personalized 1-2 page summary of your skills as a noticer: core observations about yourself that you learned in the course, and your specific strategies that you have begun to develop for being a first class noticer in the future. This assessment is required, and the grading will consist of simply verifying that you have given this task serious personal attention.
The Noticing self-assessment is due on 1/11/2015.
COURSE POLICIES