Why It’s So Hard To Catch Our Own Mistakes?

One of the areas in my work that I enjoy the most is cognitive ergonomics (also known as neuroscience or neuroergonomics).  It’s fascinating to me to learn how our brain works and how that effects how we do our work.  A common issue that many of my clients face is the difficulty in seeing what’s wrong or seeing how their current work processes are holding them back from achieving greater success.  This lack of seeing our own mistakes or potential is so pervasive.  Why is that? 

Well, I came across a recent article, “What’s Up With That:  Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos” which provides a good glimpse into why this occurs.  This article describes what happens to all of us who write—articles, reports, blogs, etc.  We write the article, we go back through to proofread it for content, flow and typos and determine it’s perfect—only to be told by a reader that there was a typo in the second sentence.  How can this be?

The article explains that “will all high level tasks  your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.” When we’re reading other peoples’ work, this helps us arrive at meaning faster by using less brain power. When we’re proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it’s easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don’t see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads.” (emphasis mine)

I emphasized the last sentence as it explains much of what we see or fail to see is because we have a version of reality in our heads that doesn’t match the reality of the world.  We are so immersed in our situation that we know how things should work in our heads that we miss what’s truly going on.

For example, I was in foundry doing a walk through with the safety manager and plant manager looking for risks.  We were watching the knock-off area (where the castings are broken off of the excess gate material) where the workers were leaning against and resting they arms on the vibrating conveyor.  I pointed that out and asked if they had concerns about that.  The answer was no—because they had never even noticed it before I pointed it out.  Now the workers had been experiencing high rates of carpal tunnel and tendinitis injuries in this area.  Was frequent intermittent vibration from lean on the vibrating conveyor a risk factor?  Perhaps a minor factor compared to other issues that were there.  However, the interesting part of this was that neither the plant or safety manager had noticed this before.  Why?  They saw it every day, it was part of the routine and in their heads it was normal.

It is difficult for us to accurately proofread our own words or to identify gaps or issues within our work/business processes.  That’s the reason I’ll ask my husband to proof read my writing as he can easily and quickly point out my errors.  That’s also the reason why companies bring in outside eyes, like myself, to quickly point out the gaps and identify effective and sustainable solutions to their processes.