UNTIED STATES
Harvard Gazette
By Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Staff Writer
Although they may seem disparate at first glance, crises like the Catholic Church clergy sex-abuse scandal, investor Bernie Madoff’s multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme, and the 2008 global financial meltdown all have at least one commonality: For years, some very smart people failed to notice or act on critical information that could have limited the damage.
More recently, executives at the Veterans Administration and General Motors have been criticized for failing to see and cure corrupt organizational cultures that led to accusations of criminal harm done to patients and consumers by negligent employees.
So why didn’t the leaders of these organizations, or others in similar straits, identify key problems and act before things turned catastrophic?
“They don’t want to see, they can’t see, the organization isn’t designed to see, and there’s other people who are doing their best to keep us from seeing,” said Max Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership,
Social scientists have long identified our tendency to overlook bad news when it suits us as “motivated blindness,” a term that refers to a systemic failure to notice unethical behavior in others when it’s not in our interest to do so. The condition affects virtually everyone. Even leaders who have gained tremendous success through focus and application in one arena sometimes lack the self-awareness to routinely question whether information on which they’re basing decisions is reliable.
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