Great leaders accept blame and pass along credit to colleagues. The less-than-great take credit and blame others–predecessors, coworkers, and alleged enemies. They insult their own team, who must deliver results. Donald Trump is a prime example, and many closer to home.
I reviewed three transformation risks—demyelination risk (28th January), subsonic sounds (25th February) and capacity for change (25th March 2021). I focus this article on inattentional blindness due to one of two obsessions: predetermined signals or self-obsession. It occurs when you are so intensely focused on signals you are looking for that you miss other signals. It could also be because of self-obsession, for example, Adolf Hitler, who was singularly obsessed with expanding lebensraum while enhancing his personal image through dress and highly practised demagoguery.
In a 1999 university experiment, respondents were asked to count the number of times the ball changed hands during the replay of a basketball match. Amidst the frames, significant, nine-second interruptions were interposed of a big gorilla thumping his chest. Many observers completely missed the multiple appearances of the gorilla since their brain was focused on the assigned task of counting the exchanges of the ball.
Motorola made the first cell phones. Company leaders were so focused on existing telecom customers that they completely missed the “gorilla’ of their customers’ customers”. Nokia took the market by storm. Later Nokia too lost its lead because of its inattentional blindness to further technological developments.
Allaudin Mohammed II of Samarkand had conquered vast lands in Central Asia by 1217. However, Baghdad’s Caliph An-Nasir rejected his claim to be Shah. Allaudin Mohammed was enraged. He became obsessed with the intransigence of the Caliph. When Mongol Genghis Khan looked to open trade relations with the Shah’s territories, driven by his ego and unrelatedly furious at the recalcitrant Caliph, the Shah rebuffed the Mongols. Trying to maintain diplomacy, Genghis sent three men as peacemakers. The Shah executed the envoys and the Mongols were enraged. Genghis sacked the Shah’s cities with a revenge that was considered brutal, even by the very brutal Mongol standards.
To my mind, ICI’s history illustrates how strong technological professionals missed the signals of a very different environment when danger was emanating from non-technology sources. ICI was a fantastic company of technical people. ICI had developed and owned more than 33,000 patents. The flip side was that its leaders treated the securities markets with disdain. In 1991, the Hanson Group, through its merchant bank, Smith New Court, bought a UKP 240 million, 2.8 percent stake in ICI. ICI was caught in inattentional blindness thereafter, before descending into a long decline. ICI, now part of Akzo Nobel, is a pale force in world business.
South Indian tea plantation industry provides another example. India had for long been the world’s largest tea producer and exporter. Sri Lanka was a much smaller producer, but gradually became a major exporter since their domestic market was small. South Indian teas and Sri Lankan teas had some similarity in tea types and quality. From the 1970s, Russia became a major buyer of south Indian teas under the rupee/rouble trade agreement. When the Russians bought, they bought humungous quantities at unrealistic prices because it was a managed trade, not a free trade. The south Indian industry lost its focus on quality and chased production volume blindly. The labour unions and the state governments of Kerala and Tamil Nadu also insisted that the wages and amenities for plantation workers be increased rapidly. This continued until the early nineties when, with economic liberalization, it started to become obvious that south Indian teas would soon be outclassed in quality as well as in price. The industry had suffered from inattentional blindness, and it took a decade of decline before plantation companies started to address the core issues at hand.
Anyone can self-test personal inattentional blindness as a leader by reflecting on six questions:
- Do I feel that many people are out to block my initiatives and dynamism?
- Do people fawn over me?
- Do my colleagues feel free to offer different views or express a contrarian view?
- Do I feel a bit cutoff from people and, hence, from reality?
- Have I made special efforts to connect with the far parts of my organization?
- When I do connect, does my visit appear stage-managed?
The answers offer the tell-tale signals. Blaming the past leaders and imaginary enemies is a sign of incompetence and insecurity, a typical response being rhetoric and rabble-rousing. Such people are open to inattentional blindness.
