If you want to improve the quality of your decisions and solutions, don’t just reengineer the way you process information. Improve the permeability of your attention system.
Biases filter out information that might be important. Distractions diminish the salience of information we already have. Have you ever been surprised when an underappreciated opinion or data point turned out to be decisive? Sometimes the information was there all along. We just didn’t recognize its importance.
Your decision-making and problem-solving methods may be excellent. But they can only act on what you’ve noticed.
This isn’t an argument for endless analysis or getting stuck in research. Healthy attention is selectively permeable. We must remain open to information that might challenge or surprise us and at the same time, avoid being hijacked by noise. The skill is attention agility.
SCAN offers another way notice better. It helps us see the types of information we naturally value and trust and the types of information we might disregard. Take the free assessment.
