The Power of Noticing: What The Best Leaders See

Max H. Bazerman, “The Power of Noticing: What The Best Leaders See” Simon & Schuster, 2014, 191 pp.

This book brings to the reader’s attention the need for those in decision-making positions and leadership to see, and evaluate, information that others overlook.  As I am not in this role, I have not done a bang-up job in my summary or notes.  However anyone who is in such a role or is teaching fundamentals of leadership will do well by reading this book.  A litany of other useful books is referenced throughout by the author; most of which I have read and previously reported on. (I am too lazy to list them here.)  In any event, the author is an expert in the field of applied behavioral psychology and instructs Harvard Business School MBAs and corporate executives the concepts in this book.

Annotated table of contents:

Chapter 1: Going beyond our natural starting points to make better decisions

Chapter 2: How motivated blindness affects all of us

Chapter 3: How leaders can “overcome threats to noticing”

Chapter 4: How entire industries can suffer from motivated blindness

Chapter 5: How misdirection can cause failures of noticing

Chapter 6: We’re more likely to miss unethical behavior when it occurs bit-by-bit

Chapter 7: Learning from what isn’t said and what didn’t happen

Chapter 8: If it’s too good to be true, there’s information you need to notice

Chapter 9: Noticing by thinking ahead

Chapter 10: Indirect harm gets less attention than direct harm unless…

Chapter 11: Leadership to avoid predictable surprises

Chapter 12: Developing the capacity to notice

My Notes:

Pg. xviii: Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (C2011), discusses the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking.  System 1 is our intuitive system: it is quick, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.  Most of our decisions occur in System 1. By contrast, System 2 thinking is slower and more conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.  However, even though it takes more effort, it is System 2 thinking that is necessary to minimize our natural bias and notice more.

Pg. 62:  Four easy steps to increase auditor independence (think Arthur Anderson, et. Al):

1.       Auditors should be hired under fixed contracts that stipulate true rotation of both individual auditors and the auditing firm.  During the time period specified in the contract, the client should not be allowed to fire the audit firm.  In addition, the client should not be allowed to rehire the auditor at the end of the contract for a legally specified amount of time.

2.      When a client changes auditors, personnel working on the audit for the outgoing auditing firm should not be allowed to move to the new aditing firm to resume work on the same client.

3.      Auditing firms should not be allowed to provide any non-audit services.

4.      The auditing personnel for a particular client should be barred from being hired by the client for a specified period of time.

Pg. 176:  If a Arthur Anderson auditor had criticized what was happening at Enron, he would have risked incurring the wrath of the rest of the organization, which was benefiting from the $25 million in auditing fees as well as an additional $27 million in consulting fees.  In auditing the system of rewards and consequences rarely encourage optimal noticing.

Pg. 105:  To acquire the power to notice means learning to hear the dog that didn’t bark and noticing the outlying fact that doesn’t seem to fit.  Noticing alerts us to seek out additional information. 

Pg. 166:  Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 was a predictable surprise in which 1,800 people died and property damage was estimated at $81 billion.  All the dangers were known.

Pg. 175:  In addition to individuals’’ failure to notice the urgency of a brewing problem, predictable surprises also result in part from flawed organizational structure, incentives, and data integration.  For example, both Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 tragedy make clear that a key culprit was a failure to integrate resources across divisions of the government; instead they operated as distinct silos.