Bounded Awareness

Seth Godin's blog had a great video this week. Check this out before reading on:

This is a recreation of a video used in a 1978 study where participants missed a woman with an umbrella slowly walking across the screen (Neisser & Dube). We all have blind spots. Bounded awareness is a term that refers to organization level blind spots. Companies and teams become so focused on keeping their eyes on the ball, that they fail to see what's right in front of them. A while back I read a great article called Decisions Without Blinders which describes how companies:
- fail to seek out important information
- fail to use information they have because they may not see the relevance
- fail to share relevant information with those who need it

It takes a lot of deliberate effort to make stimuli and information more readily available. Bounded awareness was a troubling problem during the industrial era. In the global digital world where disruptive discontinuities are a few clicks away from tossing your business upside down, it is downright insidious.