How To See the Future With a New Set of Eyes

One thing is clear: the future will happen with or without you. In other words…change is coming whether you like it or not! But in order to know what the future may bring, we have to be constantly aware of what is going on around us. There is an experiment from several years ago which demonstrates this point very well. In this experiment, subjects were shown a one-minute video and told to focus on how many passes a basketball team made. About halfway through the video, a gorilla emerged and walked across the basketball court. Half the participants in the experiment did not see the gorilla. Why is that? As a psychology major in college, I participated in this experiment, too, and admittedly never saw the gorilla. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness, or in other words, the phenomenon of not being able to perceive things that are in plain sight. How our minds see and process information is at the heart of this. The more you focus on something, the less able you become to see unexpected or unanticipated occurrences. In this case, subjects were concentrating on the ball, and were unable to see the gorilla. Depending on your focus, your entire perspective can change.

No matter who you are, we all carry around a load of mental baggage that we’ve accumulated over time. While this “knowledge” helps to shape our views of the world, it can also cloud our vision and make it near impossible to spot things that are unforeseen and new. For many unknowns, we rely on inferences made from what we do know. But are our extrapolations correct? Are the heuristics we use sufficient? How many times do we do this in our own lives, or in our businesses? Just like you would never drive using only the rear-view mirror, we shouldn’t navigate through the future this way either.

The change process is not just a journey from here to there – it’s a moving motion picture. Though I hardly (actually never) cite early 20th-century French novelists, I do, however, believe Proust’s quote is dead-on: “The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Truly meaningful discovery doesn't come just from learning new things, but from discovering new aspects of things that are already familiar to us.

So, the question I pose is this: How do we shed this metaphorical 800-pound gorilla that we all carry around with us? What are some ways we can see with new eyes? For starters, we need to question the ways we look at the future, and begin seeing it through new lenses.