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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I like to discuss why many times do we ignore the obvious, and the reason why I want to talk about this blindness that many people face when seeing really obvious evidence things is because something like three or four weeks ago, PMI release that the PMBOK Guide 7h Edition, and in the guide, they release that a set of the 12 principles. And I heard many people, and I received a few messages about why they did that.
This is so obvious. You need to take care of your project. You need to work as a team in my answer's that it’s not because it's obvious that you do it. You love talking about it, but do you do or do you really care about creating a collaborative team, or do you just want to talk about that? And trying to prepare for this episode, I saw a super nice book. It's called Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. And that this is a ten-year-old book, but it's excellent; it comes with some are excellent examples and actions you can take to avoid this behavior.
And of course a, some of the examples, our why, for example, so many investors did not realize the Ponzi Scheme of Bernard Madoff. You know, a very smart people. They didn't see that the obvious that you cannot make three, four times more money than another investor. And these are permanent. That should be something different there. But when people start realizing it was too late, people face this inertia, and then Margaret starts the book talking about biological behavior because we are not able to know everything about everything.
So our life, even if we don't act with our conscious, it's a filtering system. For example, we see many things, and we filter those who are relevant to us. We listen to things that we want more. We want to listen more. For example, if you have several information is coming to you to your vision, through your ears, you will select and be far more reactive to those that express your wellbeing.
So you do, we'll be far happier, and you will remember more compliments of people talking good things because this is based on our wellbeing. However, when we face projects and when we face transformation,
their challenging, many times we received a very, very bad news
And we don't want to see that. For example, we know that a project will be late, but we'll insist on keeping that deadline until there is no way we can change them. We prefer to become blind to a delay in the supplier or become blind that maybe we are producing something that has absolutely no value to our company, but we are just keeping moving. You know this is inertia. This natural inertia and this is inertia is this combination of this human behavior of selecting and filtering things, combine it with our small decisions.
Every single, small decision you make, you start shaping your behavior.
And one example that is excellent is about a river. Imagine when the river is just a flow of water. When you look at it, you see a completely random movement or random path, but as water comes in, comes in, and time passes, there is something like erosion on that path. And then the new water comes and goes to the same path and the same path., and this becomes the river because the water that is flowing after that erosion is flowing with less resistance.
So a small decision, a small thing that we just ignore, becomes a little bit bigger in the future and we ignore, and up to the point that we become really blind. You know, we become completely blind, and how do we avoid this? And this is I'm sure that any of you that are listening to this reflection, will have an example of that. That's someone that's that everybody I saw except him or except her or except the boss, or accept the employee.
So the first step I want to share with you is that to avoid this, you should
Work with the assumption that you are really blind. You need to say, okay, am I closing my eyes to that challenge? Maybe you should try to get this information from another sense, you know, not just your eyes, but your ears, you know your touch. You need to get this information; you need to understand that many times the information you receive, you need to challenge it. Am I being blind on receiving this and not taking action? Do you see many times, this is a good example of this when you have a case of sexual harassment or any harassment that the supervisor usually tends to say, no, this was nothing.
This was nothing serious. And then you just let it go. And the next day, it's a little bit more serious until something happens. So you need to challenge. If you receive even a small thing, you need to take it seriously, thinking, am I ignoring something, some signal that I should not ignore? The second thing is to break the silence and share mistakes. Nobody wants to share mistakes. If you do a mistake or if you fail, I need to tell you.
But most of you, if not all, we just try to hide it, hide it. Nobody puts in the CV and says, oh, my list of failures, are these ones, nobody does that. You want to just show you our perfect side. So when you break the silence and when you share mistakes, when you have an opening, knowing, knowing that your organization has that a safety net for you to talk, then you will, I would say, remove the covers of the eyes of all the people and people can see things in a more clear way.
And the third, and I said this many times, and most of the people say, oh no, you're just saying this because this is politically right to the crack today. It's high people different from you diversity. So, for example, I face so many challenges and positive challenges during my five years at the UN, because I work with very different people coming from very different backgrounds, and they helped me to see my blind spots.
They helped me to see things in a different way. And this is priceless. But if you have all your employees or your team that have the same blind spot, then it would be very hard for you to densify and ignore even when something is in front of you, and you are not able to see. So hire these foster diversity, diversity of thinking foster people that think differently from you. These will make, will reduce dramatically your blind spots, and we'll help you to see and act on our obvious things.
So think about that, always when you were making the decisions this week, okay. Am I ignoring things that are obvious that I'm talking about, but I'm not able to see an act? Think about that. And see you next week, with another five minutes of podcasts.
