Release year: 2011

Questions

What is the book about as a whole?

The book is about willful blindness, which author Margaret Heffernan defines as the human tendency to ignore obvious but uncomfortable facts, even when they’re important. It’s a psychological mechanism where people choose, often unconsciously, not to see what should be evident, especially when confronting these truths might require difficult changes or challenge their existing beliefs.

The book searches for answers to these deep questions:

What are the forces at work that make us deny the big threats that stare us in the face?
What stops us from seeing that burying knowledge makes it more powerful, and makes us so much more vulnerable?
Why, after any major failure or calamity, do voices always emerge saying they’d seen the danger, warned about the risk—but their warnings had gone unheeded?

The problem with willful blindness is that it brings comfort at the cost of allowing a problem to get worse. It’s the old “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” However, what we learn from this book is that the devil we know is often worse than the devil we choose to ignore. Thus, by blinding ourselves, we are making ourselves powerless.

What is being said in detail, and how?

Each of the twelve chapters of the book explores the forces that blind us to information, which can be summarized as:

Money
Our preference for the familiar
Our love for individuals
Our love for big ideas
Love of busyness
Our dislike of conflict and change
The human instinct to obey and conform
Our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility

Many real-life examples are given for each of the forces mentioned above. In most cases, the only way to push back against these forces is to be aware of their influence on our biases.

Two practical ideas stand out to me as something that can be helpful in fighting willful blindness.

First, an exercise used by Ginger Graham while she was CEO of Guidant (p. 226). Each member of the senior management team takes turns sitting on a tall stool in front of the room. One by one, their peers would bring up a shortcoming they’d observed and offer suggestions for improvement. The person on the seat can only listen, not comment. When several people in the group mention the same thing, the manager would begin to understand that their behavior truly needed to be addressed.

Second, some rules to adhere to when dealing with auditors (p. 229):

Have fixed, limited contract periods during which they cannot be terminated
All fees and other contractual details should be specified at the beginning of the contract and must be unchangeable
The client must be prohibited from rehiring the auditing firm at the end of the contract

There is important nuance to the book. Some amount of willful blindness can be benign. For example, the author tells the story of how her husband died of a heart condition at 38 that was due to his mother contracting measles during the pregnancy. The author would not have been able to build a relationship with her husband without some amount of willful blindness. Thus, it is everyone’s business to decide for themselves what they want to be willfully blind about. The only important rule to remember is that they have to be ready to deal with the consequences once they arrive, because willful blindness does nothing to solve the ignored problems.

Is the book true, in whole or part?

The book rings very true to me. I could relate to many of the examples given. After reading about the concept of willful blindness, I could see it as the root causes of so many of the things that create problems in our lives, our organizations, and our societies.

What of it?

On page 34 of the book, a mother looks back on a situation that took place in her family where her husband was sexually abusing their kids. As she was noticing some red flags, she remembers thinking “I wondered if I should have been concerned” before being confronted with the reality in a way that she could no longer willfully ignore.

This phrase, “I wondered if I should have been concerned” seems central to the idea of willful blindness. It is so easy to overthink situations and to worry for nothing. It is equally easy to choose to filter information that doesn’t fit our deeply help ideas. Thus, when we notice information that goes against our beliefs, this question is always popping up in the back of our heads: should we be concerned? Is such and such situation worth activating our stress response? Should we engage?

I’m tempted to lump the concept of willful blindness in the same bucket as psychological safety and learning anxiety. If we feel empowered to ask questions, and if we feel able to make sense of new complex information, we are better equipped to revert the willful blindness that is keeping us stuck in a stagnant reality.

Review

I really enjoyed learning about the concept of willful blindness. It seemed to me like an another angle to a problem that Amy Edmondson tackled in The Fearless Organization in discussing psychological safety. Many of us make the decision to settle for worse lives than we could have if we dared to challenge the status quo.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

What makes willful blindness hard to overcome is that it requires us to change our perception of ourselves. Oftentimes, we choose not to engage with the truth of a situation because it comes in direct conflict with one of our deeply held beliefs. For example, one of the interviewed women in the book tells the story of how her husband was abusing their children unbeknownst to her. There were hints of that—no action in the bedroom for years, peculiar reactions from the children to specific situations, etc.—but this flew in the face of the idea she had of her husband. Thus, her mind made a calculation of some odds: - Low odds: My husband is abusing my children and I must do something about this immediately, even if it means tearing my family in half. - High odds: My husband is the man I married and that I love. I’m probably being silly for even thinking about this.

Another captivating story of willful blindness in medicine is about the routine use of X-rays to assess the health of babies during pregnancy. When some studies from Alice Stewart in 1956 made it evident that this practice would statistically do more harm than good, the clinics did not change their process. Despite her clear findings, it took 25 years for the medical profession to stop routine prenatal x-rays! The resistance came largely from radiologists who had built their practices around this procedure and were unwilling to acknowledge its dangers. They could hardly conceive that their years of study and careful obedience to vetted processes was the source of unspeakable harm. They made the choice to be willfully blind to protect their positive self-image, at the expense of the poor parents who had to deal with the consequences of malformations.

One aspect of the book I particularly enjoyed relates to how hustle culture is encouraged by the majority of organizations, despite science clearly illustrating that tired workers give an output similar to unskilled workers. If as a business manager you were told that productivity would increase if you required workers to stop working at 5 P.M., would you really take the chance to put this idea to work, even with science on your side? So far in my career, I have not encountered anyone who was ready to go this far. It’s a very uncomfortable thought.

Most of the stories told in this book are incredibly sad. Once more, it made me realize the importance of being able learn from our mistakes and to redefine our role in a problem, at the expense of our ego if necessary, for the benefit of all. We can easily underestimate the amount of harm we can create by refusing to explore the idea that, maybe, we are not as clever or as helpful as we think we are. If we can remember to ask some very simple questions—What could I know, should I know, that I don’t know? Just what am I missing here?— it could make a world of difference for the best.

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⭐ Star Quotes

Introduction

(p. 4) Fraudsters only succeed when they depend on our desire to blind ourselves to the questions that would expose their schemes.
(p. 4) When we confront facts and fears,m we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.

Chapter 1 : Affinity and Beyond

(p. 12) Of course we consider the people who disagree with us to be the most biased of all.
(p. 19) Living, working, and making decisions with people like ourselves brings us comfort and efficiencies, but it also makes us far narrower in how we think and what we see.

Chapter 2 : Love Is Blind

(p. 24) Kissing frogs may make them act like prices or princesses. Meaning, when you love someone, they may start to adapt to your illusions of them.
(p. 29) ⭐ One of the many downsides of living in communities in which we are always surrounded by people like ourselves is that we experience very little conflict. That means we don’t develop the tools we need to manage conflict and lack confidence in our ability to do so. We persuade ourselves that the absence of conflict is the same as happiness, but that trade-off leaves us powerless.
(p. 34) The true cost of blindness is that as long as it feels safer to do and say nothing, as long as keeping peace feels more benign, abuse can continue. Our desire to protect our self-worth results in others paying a very high price.

Chapter 3 : Dangerous Convictions

(p. 51) ⭐ People are very resistant to changing what they know how to do, what they have expertise in, and what they have economic investment in.
(p. 51) ⭐ The cognitive dissonance produced by mutually exclusive beliefs is tremendously painful, even unbearable. The easiest way to reduce the pain is to eliminate one of the beliefs.
(p. 51) We are prepared to pay a very high price to preserve our most cherished ideas.

Chapter 4 : The Limits of Your Mind

(p. 72) A tired worker tends to perform like an unskilled worker.
(p. 78) Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.

Chapter 5 : The Ostrich Instruction

(p. 88) ⭐ A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.
(p. 93) ⭐ Silence is the language of inertia.
(p. 95) As long as the issue remains invisible, it is guaranteed to remain unsolved.
(p. 95) ⭐ Although most business leaders will admit privately that one of the hardest aspects of running a company is knowing what is going on inside it, many adopt leadership styles that ensure no one will ever tell them the truth.

Chapter 6 : Just Following Orders

(p. 122) After Action Review, taken from military training:
- What wen well? What didn’t do well?
- How could we do better?
(p. 122) If people don’t respect you or don’t trust you, there are lots of ways [for them not to follow your orders without disobeying].
(p. 122) It’s a misservice to sit back and want to be told what to do.
(p. 123) When all we do is obey, we become blind.
(p. 123) Obedience is a kind of shortcut, in which we trust someone else’s thinking above our own.

Chapter 7 : The Cult of Cultures

(p. 127) Under social pressure, most of us would simply rather be wrong than alone. (This is demonstrated by the Solomon Asch experiment)
(p. 133) The carrot of belonging and the stick of exclusion are powerful enough to blind us to the consequences of our actions.
(p. 138) ⭐ Being a truly good team player involves having the confidence to dissent.
(p. 144) ⭐ The more competitive a society becomes, the greater is the compulsion to conform.

Chapter 8 : Bystanders

(p. 155) Innovation fails not through lack of ideas but through lack of courage.
(p. 155) Business leaders always claim that innovation is what they want but they’re often paralyzed into inaction by hoping and assuming that someone else, somewhere, will take the risk.
(p. 157) It often takes very, very little to stop a bully; people just don’t realize the power that they have.
(p. 159) High stress tends to distance moral reflection.

Chapter 9 : Out of Sight, Out of Mind

(p. 167) ⭐ We delude ourselves that because so many words are exchanged—email, notes, and reports—somehow a great deal of communication must have taken place. But that requires that the words be read, that they be understood, and that the recipient know enough to read with discernment and empathy.
(p. 168) ⭐ Eliminating proximity clarifies the mind and facilitates more objective decision making. But it can also blind one to the details that one would prefer not to see.
(p. 168) Power imposes distance between those that have it and those that do not. It comes at a cost: isolation.
(p. 169) The combination of power, optimism, and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.
(p. 172) The division of labor isn’t designed to keep corporations blind but that is often its effect.
(p. 175) Structural blindness assumes a concrete reality when it takes the form of outsourcing. Once you outsource or subcontract work, it loses its visibility.
(p. 178) Once you outsource critical functions, you may be blind to how the work gets done. The cynical will conclude that that is precisely what outsourcing is for.

Chapter 10 : De-Moralizing Work

(p. 183) Money may make us work harder but it doesn’t make us work smarter.
(p. 187) While money is great at motivating individual effort, it carries with it significant negative social side effects.
(p. 187) Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don’t need or care about others; it’s each man for himself.
(p. 194) ⭐ All that evil needs to flourish is for good people to see nothing—and get paid for it.
(p. 198-196) Money allows us to disengage from the moral and social effects of our decisions. Because we can’t and won’t acknowledge that some of our choices are socially and morally harmful, we distance ourselves from them by claiming they’re necessary for the creation of economic wealth.
(p. 198) The common denominator of the forces that blind us to information is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. They make us feel good at first, with consequences we don’t see.

Chapter 11 : Cassandra

(p. 201) Sometimes it is the despised who know most. [… They] show us that the truth is knowable but won’t necessarily set us free.
(p. 202) Don’t fight the system, but always question it:
- What is really happening?
- Does it have to be that way?
- Am I missing something?
- Is there some other explanation or solution?

Chapter 12 : See Better

(p. 223) Diversity isn’t a form of political correctness but an insurance against groupthink.
(p. 224) “Anyone working past 6 P.M. is either incompetent or has a boss who doesn’t understand how to manage workload.” — Gail Rebuck, chairman of Random House UK.
(p. 224) ⭐ The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness, the better.
(p. 225) ⭐ While doubt isn’t a very pleasant condition, certainty is absurd.
(p. 225) “When things go wrong, employees usually have a good idea of how to fix them. You need to create a state in which they’ve got the courage to do something. You want to build organizations where everyone sees provocation as one of their essential roles.” Paul Birch, CEO of British Airways.
(p. 226) “How do you know what’s going on in the company?” is a brilliant question because, regardless of the size of the company or leadership, it’s very hard to answer.
(p. 226) “You have to decide you are going to seek disconfirmation. You can’t expect it spontaneously to emerge because it won’t happen.” — Ginger Graham, CEO of Guidant.
(p. 228) “Having a small network of people, who will bring you the unvarnished truth and with whom you can have unfettered exploration, they are a partial antidote to willful blindness.” —Saj-Nicole Joni
(p. 228) ⭐ You cannot go into execution mode and retain peripheral vision. You need a network to watch out when you have your head down.
(p. 229) Outsiders are essential to any leader’s ability to see. But it’s impossible for outsiders to remain outsiders forever.
(p. 229) Clients should be prohibited from hiring auditors to come and work for them.
(p. 230) ⭐ Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.
(p. 235) When working for confident but uncertain leaders we are less likely to feign knowledge or hide mistakes, practices that can be costly to a company
(p. 235) Admission of uncertainty leads to a search for more information, and with more information there may be more options.
(p. 236) ⭐ However vigilant leaders can be in suppressing their own thoughts and preferences, opinion and debate often flow more freely in their absence.
(p. 236) Once anyone has a hint of a desired outcome, the desire to please the boss can eliminate a whole range of options.
(p. 239) ⭐ If one of the symptoms of blindness is comfort, so one of the indicators of critical thinking may be discomfort.
(p. 239) ⭐ Unanimous decisions are incomplete decisions, made when there was too much power in the room, too much obedience, and too much conformity.
(p. 240) Delegation of knowledge builds silos. [… This requires] cultural translators who can interpret a lot of technical information, to make these subjects accessible, so that we are all thinking about them.
(p. 240) As long as we back away from subjects we find too complex or too complicated, we keep ourselves blind to them and abdicate responsibility.
(p. 240) Develop the habit to question instruments you do not understand.
(p. 241) ⭐ If you can’t be bothered to know what is going on, you have no right to complain. It comes down to whether you think of yourself as a child and a victim or as an adult who can make change.
(p. 244) Complexity persists at least in part because, as in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, no one is prepared to stand up and say: I don’t understand.
(p. 245) Hierarchies exacerbate blindness and obedience.
(p. 245) Silence becomes self-perpetuating: without conflict, everyone remains afraid and blind. The only way to break that cycle is to be willing to endure the noise.
(p. 247) We make ourselves powerless when we choose not to know. But we give ourselves hope when we insist on looking.
(p. 247) ⭐ As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions:
- What could I know, should I know, that I don’t know?
- Just what am I missing here?

(Read 102) Willful Blindness