Gorillas in the mist

By Ko de Ruyter and Debbie Keeling

One of the activities of the Motivforce R&D team is to produce learning modules. We do this with a software package that enables us to produce interactive educational material that participants in our enablement programs can use to self-learn. However, it is a complicated software program that at times is not user-friendly (our friends in the software community agree with us on that). Seemingly small corrections and updates take great effort and time to correct. Even omitted commas, non-aligned figures and unexpected font changes have turned into nightmares. Yet, like everyone, we make little mistakes and it is a pain to rule this out, despite the fact that we are aware of the time-consuming nature of corrections. We are not unique in this, as we are all prone to blind-spots when we are trying to get that main idea across or adjust the colour scheme to make a presentation look good.
 
A recent book by the sociologist Zerubavel (‘Hidden in Plain Sight: the Social Structure of Irrelevance’) addresses this phenomenon. Everything we do (and do not do) depends first and foremost on what we define as worth noticing. When working on the value propositions of our programs, you do not want to get bogged down in whether the sentences are perfectly aligned; you are articulating a vision, not bullet points. Central to the book is the invisible gorilla, see video below and see how many passes the players in white make.

People who participated in an experiment and who were told to count the passes between basketball players completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk across the screen. Also, radiologists that were asked to focus on certain patterns on a CT scan did not notice a series of mini-gorillas on the fringes of the scans. So, we look at the world in terms of foregrounds and backgrounds and this explains why sometimes we do not pick up on spelling mistakes and misalignment of text lurking in the background.
 
In many ways we are not unlike that security guard who was watching a factory worker pushing out a wheelbarrow with rubbish off the factory premises every day. Over the years, the guard became increasingly frustrated because he was convinced that the guy was smuggling stuff out, but he could never find anything and there was no proof. When they were both retired the guard and the worker ran into each other in the pub and the guard asked what the guy was stealing all these years. The worker simply answered; ‘wheelbarrows’.
 
We can change our perceptions by shifting what is in the background. Smoking is a good example. It used to be a background activity (particularly in airplanes when the smokers had the back of the plane to themselves). Now anti-smoking campaigns try to give it a foreground status so that people are conscious of the health consequences. Hence, the common advice for picking up quality assurance items is to de-familiarise oneself with the text or presentation that one has just produced. That is not easy. The well-known writer George Orwell once said ‘to see what is in front of one’s nose, needs a constant struggle’. Keep looking for the cement between the stones, the rests between the notes, the gorillas in the mist.
 
Writing this piece just made us realize that we now no longer have any excuse to make the little mistakes and that we need to keep focusing on those gorillas, because if we don’t we will start to look like them…