As a magician who performs for corporate audiences worldwide, I’ve discovered something fascinating: the most powerful blind spots aren’t the ones forced upon us – they’re the ones we willingly accept. This insight has profound implications for business leadership and decision-making.

During my shows, I often perform a trick where I invite a CEO or senior executive to make what they believe is a completely free choice. What’s remarkable isn’t that I can predict their choice – it’s that everyone in the audience, including the executive, willingly accepts certain assumptions about how the trick works. These assumptions become their blind spots.

The Power of Chosen Blind Spots

Here’s what’s fascinating: when I later reveal how the trick actually worked, people are often more amazed by what they chose not to see than by the trick itself. This reveals three crucial insights about perception in business: It highlights the power of focus, showing how easily attention can be directed or diverted. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of understanding perspective in business, as what we choose to see—or not see—can dramatically shape decisions and outcomes. By training ourselves to look beyond the obvious, we unlock opportunities hidden in plain sight.

1. Comfort in Assumptions
We actively create blind spots because they make our world more manageable. Just as audience members choose to focus on my hands rather than my words (where the real magic often happens), business leaders often focus on familiar metrics while missing crucial but uncomfortable data.

2. The Expertise Paradox
The more expert we become in our field, the more likely we are to develop voluntary blind spots. I frequently see this when performing for technical experts – they’re so focused on looking for complex technological solutions that they miss simple psychological principles at work.

3. Strategic Ignorance
Sometimes, blind spots serve a purpose. In magic, audiences tacitly agree to ignore certain things because they enhance the experience. In business, we might choose to ignore certain complexities to maintain momentum or clarity of purpose.

 

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Real-World Examples

Let me share a recent example from a corporate innovation workshop. I performed a trick where I accurately predicted the outcome of a complex group decision-making process. The audience assumed I was reading subtle behavioral cues. In reality, I had engineered the entire social dynamic of the room – something everyone had chosen to ignore because it didn’t fit their expectations of how magic works.

This mirrors what often happens in business meetings. We focus intensely on the content of presentations while ignoring the crucial social dynamics that actually drive decision-making.

The Business Impact

Understanding chosen blind spots has three major implications for business leaders:

• Recognition that some blind spots are necessary and even useful – the key is choosing them consciously
• Awareness that expertise can create voluntary blind spots that limit innovation
• Understanding that the most dangerous blind spots are often the ones we’re most comfortable with

Practical Steps

Here are three techniques I share in my keynote presentations for managing chosen blind spots:

1. The Reverse Assumption Exercise
   List your key assumptions about a challenge, then deliberately reverse each one. What new possibilities emerge?
2. The Outsider Perspective
   Regularly invite input from people who aren’t experts in your field. Their “naive” questions often highlight blind spots you’ve chosen to accept.
3. The Comfort Check
   When you feel completely certain about something, that’s your cue to look harder. Comfort often signals a chosen blind spot.

Making Choices Conscious

The goal isn’t to eliminate all blind spots – that’s neither possible nor desirable. Rather, it’s to make conscious choices about which blind spots we accept and which we challenge. As a magician, I create illusions by understanding which blind spots people will willingly accept. As a business leader, your power lies in understanding which blind spots your organization has chosen and whether those choices still serve your goals.

The Performance Perspective

Every magic performance is, in essence, a masterclass in chosen blind spots. The audience agrees to focus their attention in certain ways and ignore certain possibilities. This willing participation is what makes magic possible – and it’s also what makes business leadership challenging.

The key is to remember that, like a magic trick, most business situations involve chosen blind spots. The question isn’t whether you have them, but whether you’re choosing the right ones.

Understanding and managing chosen blind spots isn’t just about seeing more clearly – it’s about making better choices about what we choose not to see. In business, as in magic, sometimes the most powerful insights come from examining not what we’re looking at, but what we’ve chosen to ignore.