Years ago, in a management seminar, someone drew four boxes on a board.
Open. Hidden. Blind. Unknown.
It was the Johari Window, a simple way of thinking about what we know about ourselves and what others know about us. The open quadrant contains what both can see. The hidden holds what we know but others do not. The unknown belongs to neither. The blind quadrant is more troublesome. It contains what others can see in us that we cannot see ourselves.
A manager believes he is decisive; his people experience impatience. A leader thinks she is giving autonomy; her team experiences absence. Someone sincerely believes himself demanding but fair; others notice whose mistakes receive understanding and whose receive judgment. No dishonesty is necessary. The things others see in us are sometimes the things we would sincerely deny, not because we are lying, but because from where we stand, they are invisible.
Years of working with organizations have made that old diagram more interesting to me. Junior people are corrected constantly. As people rise, correction can become scarcer. Power does not necessarily enlarge the blind spot. It can simply reduce the number of people willing to point at it.
Perhaps this is one reason organizations build mechanisms of challenge: reconciliation, independent review, audit, boards, segregation of duties. They protect institutions from dishonesty, certainly. But they also protect them from what honest people cannot see about themselves.
Sincerity is not a control.
Sometimes we acquire power over the room. Sometimes we simply choose a room that will not contradict us.
The same thing happens outside office walls. We find communities that see the world much as we do. Their anger becomes hatred; ours, righteous indignation. Their photograph is propaganda; ours is service. Their religious gesture is performative; ours is devotion. Their unsupported assertion requires evidence; ours is something everybody knows.
Different circumstances can justify different judgments. The question is whether our method changes with the person being judged. We may recognize a fault perfectly. We simply recognize it only when someone else is committing it. This need not even be hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies some awareness of the contradiction. The old window suggests a more unsettling possibility.
We genuinely may not see it.
I found myself thinking of people who might benefit from remembering that old diagram. It took me a little longer to notice what I was doing.
I was standing outside everybody else’s window.
If I could identify my own blind spot simply by looking inward, it would not be blind. So what are my versions of everybody knows? Who receives complexity from me and who receives caricature? Where do I demand evidence I do not demand elsewhere?
Would I see the same thing if I changed the name?
Not everyone who disagrees with us is right. Criticism can be malicious, ignorant or simply mistaken. The lesson is not that disagreement deserves surrender. It deserves examination.
Accounts are reconciled. Writers have editors. A martial artist needs someone at the other end of the technique. Examination of conscience recognizes that sincerity alone does not make us right. Sometimes we need another pair of eyes not because ours are poor, but because no pair of eyes can see itself seeing.
The other person possesses one advantage we cannot acquire through greater intelligence, experience or introspection. They are standing somewhere we cannot stand.
Outside ourselves.
I think again of those four boxes on the board. Perhaps the younger executive who first encountered them assumed that experience and self-awareness would gradually make one of them smaller. Enough years, enough correction, enough wisdom, and eventually there would be very little left that others could see and he could not.
I am less certain now.
Open. Hidden. Unknown.
And one box that looks rather different after all these years.
Blind.
The blind spot is not the thing we refuse to see.
It is the thing we do not yet know we are unable to see.