MANAGEMENT SPECIAL ....................Guru Speak Max Bazerman, Professor, Author - The Power of Noticing

Guru Speak Max Bazerman, Professor, Author - The Power of Noticing





The ability to notice is a key leadership skill says business psychologist Max Bazerman

In his 1997 novella The Actuals, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow introduced the term `first class noticer' to describe those who keenly observe the world around them. Five years later, management guru Warren Bennis introduced the first class noticer to leadership literature as one who recognizes talent, identifies opportunities and avoids pitfalls. The noticer is back again in The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See a recent book by Max Bazerman, co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Straus Professor at Harvard Business School. In this interview, Bazerman talks of how leaders sometimes need to give up focus and instead observe what's going on around them.

Edited excerpts:

Why is too much focus dangerous for a leader?

Many of us are so focused that we miss out on critical information around us. Many people who are now in leadership positions came up through more technical, narrow parts of their business, where focus was a good thing because they had a narrow task to complete.But once these people become leaders, the ability to notice critical challenges, opportunities and threats in the environment becomes critical.

What does a `first-class noticer' look like?

They're people who make an extra effort to identify what information is needed. They notice when something seems `off', and rather than ignore it because they don't know what it is, they work hard to figure out what it is. In an organisation, it's the person who makes sure that the incentive structure isn't driving people to not notice things -which is what auditing firms are currently doing. It's also the person who thinks about what norms are being created within their organisation for speaking up, because so often the way we can notice is through the eyes and minds of the people around us.

What gets in the way of noticing?

We often show up in a meeting room and somebody has a nice PowerPoint slide presentation for us. They unintentionally influence what we pay attention to and think about. The fact is, we can never assume that the information we need to make a good decision is right in front of us.

Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology, coined the term `inattentional blindness'. In his experiment, people were asked to watch a video of two basketball teams -one in white shirts, the other in black -passing a basketball to each other. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made between the players in the white t-shirts.In the original video, a woman with an umbrella walks right through the middle of the basketball court, and something amazing happens: few people see her, because they are completely focused on the white-clad team passing the ball. The more famous version of this experiment was done by one of Neisser's students, Dan Simons, and in his version, the woman with an umbrella was replaced by a gorilla. Again, most people watching the video didn't see the gorilla.

My colleague Dolly Chugh of NYU and I use the term `bounded awareness' to describe this phenomenon. As the literature on inattentional blindness developed over the years, it really became a perceptual literature: it looked at what we literally see with our eyes and what we don't see. What Dolly and I focus on is the fact that, in many cases, leaders don't notice critical information that isn't visual.

You say corporate boards are particularly guilty of this?

I find it astonishing the degree to which very smart people on boards don't notice critical information. There were some impressive people on the Enron board who should have noticed that something was wrong; and there were smart people on the Satyam board who should have noticed that something was wrong. This keeps happening over and over again.

Are auditors equally culpable?

I view the `Big Four' auditing firms as playing a significant role in preventing us from get ting to auditor independence. Auditing firms should only audit. They shouldn't be allowed to sell consulting services, and individuals shouldn't be allowed to be re-hired by a firm that they've audited. They should be on nonfireable, non-renewable contracts.

Think about it this way: if you ask a parent, “How smart is your child?“, nobody assumes that the parent is an objective source of that information, and at the same time, no one assumes that the parent is evil if they give you a more positive response than is warranted.When we care about the data that we're reporting on, it is human nature to see that data in a positive way. Auditing firms have developed consulting practices alongside their auditing services. And they have developed government-approved processes that allow corporates to decide as to whether or not they are rehired as either consultants or auditors.

When people leave an auditing firm, the place that they are most likely to go to work for is one of their former clients. And when you create this kind of relationship where the auditor has lots of incentives to make sure that the firm is happy, I would argue that they are no longer capable of independence. This discussion has been going on since 1997, when my colleagues and I wrote a paper called The Impossibility of Auditor Independence. Everything we know about psychology suggests that they are providing biased auditing, and they will continue to do that for as long as they are allowed to work politically to keep us from making the regulatory changes required for truly independent auditing.

How pervasive is motivated blindness in the corporate world?

While it is pervasive, I do believe that it is surmountable, as countless whistleblowers indicate. More and more people are realizing that effective decision making -and consequently, effective leadership -can hinge on overcoming motivational blindness. How can we turn this into common practice? First, as individuals, we can learn to more fully notice the facts around us. Second, we can make decisions to notice and act when it is appropriate to do so. Third, we can create clear consequences for leaders when they fail to act on facts that indicate unethical behavior. And fourth, leaders can provide decision makers throughout the organisation with incentives to speak up. CD Reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Managment.

by Karen Christensen

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