My wife, Ellen, couldn’t find her keys this morning as she was leaving for work. They were obviously in the house somewhere because she drove home last night and didn’t’ go anywhere. I was in the kitchen and went to help her. 

“Are they in your coat pocket?” She checked again. “I already checked and I wore this coat yesterday, so they’re not in another coat.” 

“Did you check your pu…?” “Yes, already checked my purse but I’ll check again.”  

I looked down where she had our most used sets of keys spread out in front of her. There they were. Right in front of her nose. 

“Here they are.” I picked them up and handed them to her. “It’s always harder to see what’s right in front of you.” 

She just shook her head and chuckled. “Do you want to come to work with me today? I might need you.” 

Now, there’s two things you need to know about my wife. First, I call her Eagle Eye Ellen because she never misses anything. And second, when she loses something (a rarity), I usually can locate it because I lose stuff all the time and have, out of necessity, become adept at finding things. 

My little gem of wisdom – It’s always harder to see what’s right in front of you – is true in just about every situation. How many times have you looked for something high and low, only to find it in the most obvious place? 

Your misplaced phone? It’s in your hand. In fact, you’re using the flashlight on your phone to look for your phone. 

Your lost glasses? They’re on your head. Or worse? They’re on your face. 

The new hire who resigned after you spent six months training him? His resume indicated that he was a job jumper, but you ignored it. 

The medical assistant who just took another job? She told you a hundred times in a hundred different ways that she was ready for a more challenging job in your health center. 

There are many reasons why we miss the obvious opportunities and blinding warning lights that are right in front of us. Here are a few: 

1. Farsightedness. Your job is to both succeed in your current environment while planning for the future. But organizations often spend more time developing strategic plans for the next five years than they do seeing what’s happening in the next five days or five weeks. Example: Your long-range plan calls for improved employee retention but in the short term you keep hemorrhaging entry levels like medical assistants. Can you implement something quickly like stay interviews? How about a PowerPoint illustrating why the dollar value of your benefit package makes up for the $2/hour raise an MA will get if she jumps to the local health system? 

2. Missing a person’s potential. Usually when I think of missed potential, I think of entry level employees who would make great managers or have the potential to advance their careers through education and experience. But this is also true for highly trained professionals who may not be getting a chance to contribute on an executive level. It also applies to ourselves. Are we missing our own potential and failing to exhibit it to our supervisors and colleagues? 

3. Only seeing what you expect to see. Observational bias is a term used in research for those times when expectations, beliefs, or preconceptions influence what researchers “see, record, or interpret in a study, causing them to favor expected outcomes and skew results.” Another term that applies is “preconceived notions.” So, when you do an employee satisfaction survey, you only see the negative results, and you miss the rays of positivity that you could build upon. Or, vice versa, you glom onto the positive results and miss the negatives that could be corrected. 

So how do you dissipate the fog caused these farsightedness, missing potential, and observational bias? A few suggestions: 

• Get others involved – My wife needed me to point to the keys lying in front of her. She is highly intelligent and observant but in that moment she needed another set of eyes and another perspective. Ask your colleagues, employees, bosses, life partners, or whomever if they see something you don’t. 

• Obvious Solutions – When you ask people to help, sometimes they give you suggestions you feel are too obvious to work. Employees are leaving because they make more money somewhere else, so your spouse says, “Why don’t you pay them more?”  Well, why don’t you? How could you make that happen? Don’t instantly reject the obvious. 

• Revisit Old Ideas – Just because it didn’t work in the past, doesn’t mean it WON’T work now. Conversely, just because it did work in the past, doesn’t mean it WILL work now. But you won’t know if you just reject any old ideas. 

Finally, you can send me an email or give me a call for a quick, free consultation. But I’m betting you can, on your own, find what’s right in front of your nose. Just look.