Ignorant Blindness; Willful Blindness; Evil Blindness – This Really is Something to Tackle

Willfully blind:  denying truths that are too painful, too frightening to confront.  It’s something we all do…  The problem arises when we use the same mechanism to deny uncomfortable truths that cry out for acknowledgement, debate, action, and change.  Many, perhaps even most, of the greatest crimes have been committed not in the dark, hidden where no one could see them, but in full view of so many people who simply chose not to look and not to question.  Whether in the Catholic Church, the SEC, Nazi Germany, the embers of BP’s refinery, the military in Iraq, or the dog-eat-dog world of sub-prime mortgage lenders, the central challenge posed by each case was not harm that was invisible, but harm that so many preferred to ignore. (emphasis added).
Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness:  Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril

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It’s time to face the obvious truth — we all suffer from a touch of willful blindness.  And the “touch” of willful blindness is a slight problem. It is the big whopping cases of willful blindness that present the big whopping problems.

There are many levels of such blindness.  Let’s try these as descriptives:

Ignorant blindness.  A company makes a bet that their product will endure in the face of the new competitor (“no one will ever give up a tiny keyboard for a touch screen”).  This is blindness to the future, blindness to the world changing around us.  Bad, certainly – but not “wrong” in intent – maybe just unlucky blindness.

Willful Blindness. A leader, a person, a company, an entire society willfully ignores a great wrong, and “defends” when things are no longer defensible.  In this week’s news, it looks like 60 Minutes, and I suspect the NFL, especially re. the Miami Dolphins “bullying” issue (but also, with this week’s news about Tony Dorsett, the entire NFL re. the concussion/brain damage issue is again ready for a deeper look), might serve as examples of such willful blindness.

{There are so many thoughtful and thought-provoking articles on the Miami Dolphins story.  This is the best one I’ve read so far:  National Followers League – Why the Miami Dolphins sided with the bully and not his victim by Josh Levin, from Slate.com.  I’ve blogged about this issue here:  Do You Play Well with Others? – Thoughts on the Miami Dolphins “Bullying” Story.}

Evil Blindness.  This is when something is truly wrong, absolutely evil, in intent.  Let’s go with the example of all examples.  In Nazi Germany, the leaders who decided to carry out the Holocaust were the ones guilty of “evil blindness.”  (But there are plenty of other examples throughout history).

In the Nazi Germany example, there were leaders who had “evil blindness,” and then massive numbers of followers who had “willful blindness” who willingly went along.  And, the outcome was just unimaginably…evil.  (You know – the famous, and true, warning:  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”).

It’s easy to label “evil blindness” – for example, people who out and out lie to sell a product, (read The Big Short by Michael Lewis for some pretty stark examples of this).  But for every evil blindness case, there seems to be a support role for the many who are “willfully blind,” ignoring, somewhat on purpose, all of the warning signs.  The “harm that so many prefer to ignore.”

I keep coming back to the truth of Heffernan’s book.  I’ve blogged about it often.  I think Margaret Heffernan’s book Willful Blindness should be a genuine must-read for any leader and every executive team.  Because the ripple effects of willful blindness are just so devastating, to so very many…