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Summary Of The Power Of Noticing By Mark Bazerman

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Noticing Reading Mark Bazerman’s book “The Power of Noticing” can be an eye-opening experience. Throughout the book, Bazerman focuses on how noticing or not noticing can affect you and others around you. Bazerman presents the reader with insightful anecdotes and convincing arguments about the power of perception and the work of the leader. Some of the valuable points that Bazerman presents in the early chapters address such topics as “inattentional blindness” and “bounded awareness” (pp. 12‐13). For most readers these issues, which are critical to Bazerman’s foundation of noticing, may well be unfamiliar. Specifically, they speak to how people can be so intensely focused on a particular issue that they altogether miss critical events or …show more content…

Here the author provides a compelling and powerful argument for the ways in which leaders can intentionally bias their opinions and positions by willfully ignoring concrete data that would argue that they consider an alternate position to the one they have taken. Bazerman’s anecdotes here are taken from examining how Penn State and its venerated football program approached the sexual abuse perpetrated by Jerry Sandusky. The author argues that, at its core, the key leaders and decision makers were not willing to “see” or “consider” the blatant acts of abuse that were unfolding before their eyes because of a greater concern for the preservation of the university and the continued veneration of its football program and the reputation of the coach. Even though the data was visible for all to see, no one was willing to actually see it and report it. As Bazerman notes, “when we have a vested self‐interest in a situation, we have difficulty approaching the situation without bias, no matter how well‐calibrated we believe our moral compass to be” (p. …show more content…

This self‐serving bias takes disconfirming information and translates it to the point that it ends up supporting and confirming one’s position. “We discount facts,” argues Bazerman, “that contradict the conclusions we want to reach, and we uncritically accept evidence that supports our positions. Unaware of our skewed information processing, we erroneously conclude that our judgments are free of bias” (p. 53). Bazerman illustrates this bias at work in his research of the auditing process at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Despite the facts of contradiction and conflict of interest, auditors believe they are fully independent even when the successes of the organizations they audit are tightly connected to their own success. Bazerman notes that, based on their research, when individuals have a measure of self‐interest in the outcome, “they are no longer capable of independence” (p.

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