Blind Spots
Image courtesy of Microsoft
20+ years after my first publication, The Only BAD MISTAKE You Make Is The One You Never Learn From: Lessons From The Battle Front, I took courage from a friend of mine, a lawyer out to change the way the legal industry thinks, and confused as to where his actual country of domicile is located (South Africa or the U.K., or perhaps a sailboat somewhere in the Carribean), Alex Hamilton., CEO of Radiant Law, a literal, virtual law firm. Alex just completed his 2nd edition of his book on contracts, “Sign Here.”
And so, inspired by his effort, I started my own project(s). What I am working on now, is a volume, the working title for which is “SIMPLE BUT HARD: The Performance Paradox and Organizational Excellence.” Part 1 of the text, is “Seek Understanding.,” a necessary aspect of both personal and organizational excellence. To understand, we have to know what we yet don’t know. We have to be open to our blind spots and those of the organization as well.
Some time ago, I read a book by the Arbinger Institute, called Leadership and Self-Deception. The subtitle was “Getting Out Of The Box,” the box being a metaphor for our blind spots. The book provided an outstanding example of how we find ourselves “in the box” by illustrating with the way a baby learns to crawl. When it first recognizes it can move around, it does so by accident, having raised up on its arms, perhaps sustained for a moment or two, and then slides backward as its ability to maintain a semi-plank position is extremely limited. However, it learned it can move, so it does it again. And again, And again, and again. Motion is delightful. It can see new things, or familiar things from a different perspective.
But the baby is blind because it is moving backward, rather than forward. Eventually it gets stuck. Use of the term “stuck” is deliberate, because that is what it is. The baby is stuck. It raises on its hands in effort to change from being stuck to being unstuck. But the mechanism of action that was successful before, no longer is.
What happens next? The baby does what all babies do when they don’t understand something and are frustrated by their lack of understanding. They cry. If nothing changes, the wail (a more urgent and severe order of crying.) Then an adult, or responsible sibling comes to see what the problem is. They can clearly see that they baby is stuck and why. As a result they take action. Most often, the action is that they pick up the baby and turn it around so it can see why it was stuck. The baby realizes - perhaps after a few iterations of this process - that it must start think about what is behind it or figure out how to move forward rather than backward.
We are all stuck to one degree or another. We are in the box. And it is safe to say there are lots of boxes. The most important thing about being in the box, is getting out of it. The most important thing to getting out of it is being humble enough to accept when someone let’s us know we are in the box. When they are telling us we are in the box, they are only trying to help us become unstuck.
We don’t know, what we don’t know. In other words, we have blind spots. All of us.
What will we do differently to help us to help others show us our bind spots?
A thought worth pondering.
I very much appreciate you and the time you have taken to read this article. You can find more articles like this from me at https://www.legup.solutions/blog.
If you have thoughts on this or other topics regarding yours or your organization’s journey of excellence, feel free to continue the conversation on my Secret Sauce slack feed.
Originally published at https://www.legup.solutions on 06 AUG 2024