December 1944, the Ardennes forest, near the German border. The American generals looked across the line at what the Germans had left, and the math was easy.
The Germans had few troops, and many of them were children under eighteen. They had almost no fuel and were running out of food.
The terrain was rough, and the weather was atrocious. No rational German commander would attack under those conditions.
So the Americans left their line thin and thinly supplied. Why spend resources on a front where nothing was going to happen?
Then the Germans attacked.
By the time the Battle of the Bulge ended, just over a month later, 19,000 Americans were dead, and another 70,000 were wounded or missing. (Morgan Housel lays this out in Same as Ever, which is where I found it.)
Every fact on the generals’ list was true. The Germans really were short on almost everything. What the list couldn’t hold was the man giving the orders. Hitler was, in Housel’s words, unhinged and detached from reality and reason. When his generals asked where the fuel would come from, he told them to steal it from the Americans.
The generals had reasoned flawlessly about a rational opponent. The man giving the orders wasn’t one.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has a name for what happened to them: What You See Is All There Is. The brain takes the facts in front of it, builds the most convincing story it can, and never stops to ask what’s missing. The story feels complete because nothing in it feels absent.
I’d love to tell you that experience fixes this. It takes a lot of experience and wisdom to learn that what you’re looking at is not the whole thing, and I’m still learning it. But these were generals. Not interns who’d wandered into the war room. They had the experience, and it didn’t save them. If anything, a good story built by an experienced mind is harder to doubt.
Context makes it worse. When you’re reactive, and reality changes every minute, there’s no room to look past what’s in front of you. The only way through, as far as I can tell, is a system or process that forces you to stop, breathe, and zoom out, so you can notice what everyone else is missing.
That makes the process itself a blind spot. The machinery sets the speed at a company, and it sets the view too. Whatever lands on your desk is what you’ll treat as the whole picture. (This is the thread I keep pulling in The Blind Spot: what you don’t see is running your strategy.)
So the process I’d want starts with a pause and one question.
Why am I seeing this and not something else? And what’s behind this?
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[…] built to stop exactly that. They can only see what’s in front of them, which is the same trap the generals in the Ardennes fell into. What’s in front of them is a problem, so they throw everything at […]