It pays to pause

🤔 The situation is not always as cut-and-dried as it first appears‼️

When volunteers are shown a film of a driver CUTTING ACROSS LANES 😠 they will almost unanimously apportion BLAME. They will infer that he is SELFISH, IMPATIENT and OUT OF CONTROL🤬. 
And this inference may turn out to be true… After all, the driver may have had the sun in his eyes. He may have been swerving to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. In fact, there are many posible mitigating factors. To most observers LOOKING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN, THESE DO NOT REGISTER 😵‍💫. It is not because they don’t think such possibilities are irrelevant, it is that often THEY DON’T EVEN CONSIDER THEM 😬

THE BRAIN 🧠 JUST PLUMPS FOR THE SIMPLEST, MOST INTUITIVE NARRATIVE: ‘He’s a homicidal fool!😒 This is sometimes called by the rather inelegant name of the ❝FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR❞
It is only when the question is flipped – ‘WHAT HAPPENED THE LAST TIME YOU JUMPED LANES?’ – that volunteers pause to consider the SITUATIONAL FACTORS 😦. ‘Oh, yeah, that was because I thought a child was about to run across the street!’ Often these excuses are self-serving. But they are not always so. Sometimes there really are wider issues that lead to mistakes – but we cannot even see them if we do not consider them, still less investigate them 🔬

Even in an absurdly simple event like this, then, IT PAYS TO PAUSE, TO LOOK BENEATH THE SURFACE, TO CHALLENGE THE MOST OBVIOUS, REDUCTIONIST NARRATIVE 🕵🏻‍♂️
This is not about being’ soft, but about LEARNING 🤓what really went wrong ⚠️

How much more important to engage in this kind of activity in a complex, interdependent system, like a hospital or business? 👩🏽‍💼

✍️ From Matthew Syed, “BLACK BOX THINKING” 📖