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1-Page Summary of The Power of Noticing

Overview

Just Listen is a book that teaches you the basics of persuasion and listening. You’ll learn how to better communicate your ideas by learning about human psychology, brain chemistry and behavior.

Some of the biggest disasters in history were caused by people not noticing important details.

We are all blind to certain things, even when they’re right in front of us. We need to be able to notice the important details in order to be successful leaders. This piece will teach you why it’s easy for us to overlook things and how that can affect our lives negatively. It’ll also teach you how to become a better observer and understand why noticing is so valuable.

In this article, you’ll learn why baseball coaches ignored players’ steroid use and how the BP CEO lost his job over one sentence. You’ll also discover why Sears encouraged employees to scam its customers.

Big Idea #1: If you focus too much on one thing, you might miss something else.

The horses in cities wear blinders because they don’t want to be distracted by the traffic or people. They only focus on what’s in front of them.

People can also miss the obvious because they’re focusing on something else. In a video from the 1970s, people were asked to count how many times players wearing white shirts passed the basketball. People were able to do that easily, but most viewers didn’t notice anything strange about it.

But while people are counting the passes, something strange happens: a woman dressed in black holding an umbrella walks through the scene. Most viewers don’t remember it because they’re focused on counting passes. This is called inattentional blindness.

Yet it is possible to overcome inattentional blindness. We have to learn how to notice things more thoroughly.

The power of noticing is the ability to focus on one thing without being distracted by everything else. The following are some ways that leaders can do this:

Big Idea #2: The Challenger disaster teaches us that we need to pay attention to the right details.

So, you didn’t notice the woman with an umbrella in the video. That’s not a big deal because it was harmless. However, missing important details can have serious consequences in other situations.

The 1986 Challenger disaster is one example of a tragic event caused by engineers having concerns. The engineers worried that the temperature might play a role in whether or not the launch was successful, but they were ignored.

Engineers ran some simulations and found that seven of 24 tests were unsuccessful. NASA focused on this 7:24 chance of failure, although others disagreed with the risk assessment. The launch went forward despite lingering concerns, resulting in a disaster that killed all crew members (including one woman) and was one of the biggest catastrophes in aerospace history. If only they had noticed a crucial detail—the O-ring—the disaster could have been prevented.

Engineers were so focused on the seven simulations that failed, they didn’t pay attention to the temperature of those that succeeded. If they had, they would’ve noticed a crucial detail: all successful ones were done when it was above 65 degrees Fahrenheit. On the day Challenger launched, it was much colder at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. If engineers had paid less attention to failures and more attention to successes then maybe there wouldn’t have been a 99 percent chance of failure on launch day.

The Challenger disaster was caused by people paying too much attention to the wrong details. This kind of blindness can happen more often than we think, and it’s important to prevent that from happening.