The Subtle Art of Seeing: What change blindness teaches us about leadership

alicepailhes
Oct 6
4 min read

Can you spot the difference?

At first glance, the two images below look identical. A nice garden, a few people peacefully standing there, a nice afternoon light with just one cloud drifting across the sky.

Image from : Le Moan, S., & Pedersen, M. (2019). “A Three-Feature Model to Predict Colour Change Blindness.”

But look again... the color of the roof is different.

If you didn’t notice right away, don't worry, your eyes aren't broken. Most people don’t.

It’s that our brains are efficiently selective.

This is the fascinating phenomenon known as change blindness — our tendency to miss even large changes in a visual scene when they occur gradually or outside the focus of our attention. And as it turns out, what happens in our visual system mirrors what happens in organizations, teams, and even our own lives.

Why we don’t see what’s changing

In their paper, researchers Steven Le Moan and Marius Pedersen developed a model predicting when color changes go unnoticed. Their findings suggest that when changes are subtle, low-contrast, or evolve gradually, the visual system tends to maintain the illusion of stability — a reminder that perception prioritizes continuity over precision.

In other words, we don’t detect the change (or at least struggle to) because the brain assumes continuity — a shortcut that allows us to focus on what seems most important in the moment.

Earlier research by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin demonstrated this dramatically: in their now-famous “door experiment,” a person asking for directions on the street was secretly swapped for another while a door passed between them. About half the participants didn’t notice.

Contrary to what we tend to think, our awareness isn’t a camera recording everything around us, but act more as a spotlight — narrow, biased, and easily misdirected.

The leadership parallel

Organizations operate under the same cognitive constraints as individuals.

Leaders and teams don’t purposely ignore change out of carelessness; they miss it because it doesn’t shout loud enough. Our brains, and by extension, our systems, are tuned to notice disruption, not drift.

Consider a few examples:

Cultural erosion: The team spirit that once defined your organization starts to thin. Not overnight, but one subtle compromise at a time — a snide remark left unaddressed, a skipped ritual, a leader who used to say “thank you” now rushing past.
Loss of innovation: Meetings grow quieter. Experiments become rarer. Curiosity fades. But there’s no clear breaking point to react to...so no one does.
Moral drift: A company that prides itself on integrity overlooks “small” shortcuts. Slowly, ethical norms shift until a scandal makes everyone wonder: When did we cross the line?

These are the organizational equivalents of the roof that changed color. No one saw the moment it happened, but the picture is definitely no longer the same.

The science of drift

Psychologists often use the “boiling frog” metaphor to describe our tendency to overlook gradual change.When our environment deteriorates slowly — whether in our living conditions, relationships, or work — we tend to adapt rather than act, until it becomes too late or too difficult to reverse course.

Of course, real frogs don’t actually behave this way — but humans often do. We normalize discomfort when it increases slowly enough to escape our attention.

This tendency connects with several well-documented cognitive biases:

Habituation: The more we’re exposed to a stimulus, the less we notice it. What once felt new or urgent fades into background noise.
Status quo bias: We prefer to believe that things are stable and familiar, even when data suggests otherwise.
Normalcy bias: We underestimate the likelihood or impact of disruptive change, convincing ourselves that the current state will continue.

When these mechanisms interact, they create blind spots in perception — both visual and organizational.

How great leaders can overcome change blindness

Leadership, at its core, is about perception — noticing what others overlook, sensing shifts before they become shocks, and helping teams see what’s changing before it’s too late.

Here are four evidence-based practices that can help leaders train their perception and stay alert to subtle shifts:

1. Design attention, don’t assume it

Attention is a limited resource, and great leaders use it deliberately.

Build regular reflection points into meetings: “What’s changed since last quarter that we haven’t talked about?”
Use data visualization that highlights drift, not just disruption — for example, tracking small but steady declines in engagement or morale.
Rotate who reports trends and insights, to expand the team’s collective field of view.

2. Listen for the quiet signals

Leaders often think of observation as a visual skill. But change blindness extends to emotion and tone.

Notice energy shifts in meetings — who’s speaking less, who’s not laughing anymore, who seems distracted.
Track the language drift in your organization: the metaphors, slogans, and stories that people use. When those change, culture is changing too.
Encourage “micro feedback loops” — quick, informal check-ins that surface the early signs of disengagement before they calcify.

3. Cultivate a culture of curiosity

Curiosity widens attention and prevents fixation.

Leaders who ask better questions train their teams to see more. Questions like:

“What feels slightly off right now?”
“What have we stopped noticing?”
“If we zoomed out, what might we realize has changed?”

Research by psychologist Francesca Gino at Harvard shows that curious teams perform better, make fewer errors, and adapt faster — because they’re more attuned to emerging information.

Seeing again, on purpose

The paradox of leadership is that the more familiar things become, the less clearly we see them. That’s why awareness is not a one-time act, but a practice.

The next time you walk into a meeting and think, everything seems the same, pause. Maybe it’s not.

Maybe the roof has changed color.

And maybe that tiny shift — the one no one noticed — is where the next big transformation begins.