Leading in a Non-Linear World

CHAPTER 6SEE – THE FRAMES WE HOLD

Because our brains crave stability, we often see what we want to see when we might need to let in the unforeseen or unwelcome. Building a mindset challenges us to question the reliability of what we see, and therefore what we ‘know’. Seeing intentionally means harnessing our metacognition to stand back and consider the frames, or lenses, we hold up to the world and ask what they allow us to discern, disregard, or discount.

We should start by challenging a fundamental assumption about our perception; that what we see is objective reality. Since we have an extraordinarily high-definition visual experience of the world, unsurprisingly we assume that it's an objective, comprehensive, and accurate representation. It's not.

As we survey the world and notice people, mountains, or a can of soup, what we're seeing is a representation of those objects after we process the information, not the information itself. It's not reality but a construction that our brain pieces together based on our experiences, biases, and assumptions. The information from the light photons hitting our eyes is entirely ambiguous on its own and only 10% of the data that our brains use to construct our experience of vision comes from our eyes. As the perceptual neuroscientist Beau Lotto suggests, ‘the brain didn't evolve to create an accurate representation of the world, but one that is useful’. Being able to question what we see – our most tangible and seemingly real experience ...