“We all share one thing. We share the illusion that we see the world the same as everybody else. … Only by testing your knowledge can you see the world as it actually is.”
You’ve no doubt heard about the research done by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They’re the psychologists who used a group passing a basketball and a person dressed in a gorilla suit to call our attention to the fact that we don’t see the world as it is but we see the world as we are conditioned to perceive it and as we expect it to be. (You can read more about their research in their popular 2011 book, "The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.") Theirs is an important caution for us in our practice of leadership.
In January, I wrote a blog post about learning to lead intuitively or, as I called it then, to lead by feel. In the weeks since, I read the psychologist Alexandra Horowitz’s fascinating book "On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes," which has influenced my thinking about leading by intuition.
The book is an account of Horowitz’s own rediscovery of her neighborhood in New York by exploring it with the help of others who have been trained to see in different ways. Among others, she walks with a geologist, an architect, an entomologist and a typesetter, and each one calls her attention to elements of her block that she never noticed before -- the rock formations beneath building foundations, the subtle architectural features of familiar buildings, the insects scurrying and flying, the lettering of the advertisements that decorate her streets and sidewalks. Each one of these experts invites her to find the foreign in the familiar of her own neighborhood.
Her book, along with the insights of Chabris and Simons, now have me thinking more about the way that our expectations and our attention often conspire against us so that we miss things that are readily apparent within our view. Psychologists use the term “inattentional blindness” to speak about this phenomenon, and it can be the lurking shadow side of leading intuitively.
As we exercise leadership, we are often asked to make difficult decisions in complicated circumstances using our perceptions of these situations as the primary guide for our decision-making. This is especially the case when the data at our disposal are inconclusive or otherwise unhelpful. These psychologists remind us, though, that we must be willing to test our assumptions and perceptions against the perceptions of others to ensure that what we are seeing and feeling is as close to the reality of the situation as possible and not just our imagined reality of the situation.
For us, as Christian leaders, there is a helpful echo to our theological traditions in these cautions, too. The broad sweep of Christian tradition would have us be a bit dubious of overreliance on our own perception, marked and marred as it is by our own proclivities to choose that which is not God and that which is not good. It is a practice of faith to test assumption, and it is a hallmark of Christian leadership.
There is gift in learning to lead intuitively, but there is wisdom and faith in checking our perception.
