Process Blindness is the best reason to hire an outside lean consultant.
Process blindness often occurs when you become an expert on your process. You understand it so well that it becomes a well oiled machine that appears to runs perfectly.
The problem is that your process can be improved but you can’t see it.
Example:
You first learned your letters and sounds and then became an emergent reader putting letters together to form whole words.
You eventually became an expert in reading English to understand that “rough” doesn’t sound like “dough” and that “phone” sounds like it starts with the letter “F”.
You can even read this paragraph:
"Anccrdoig to a rseaehcer at an
Egnilsh uinevsrtiy, it dseon't meattr in waht oerdr the letrtes in a wrod are,
the olny ipmroatnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat lteetr is at the rihgt
palcae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sltil raed it wtiohut proeblm.
Tihs is bcsaeue we do not raed erevy lteetr by itslef but the wrod as a wohle."
"According to a researcher at an English university, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter is at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because we do not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole."
Being an expert allows you to fill in the blanks and unscramble situations without thinking about it. That’s a great skill to have, but what happens when you fill in the blanks incorrectly:
Example:
Count the number of 'F's in the
following text:
---------------------------------------
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
--------------------------------------
Did you get all 3?
There were actually 6 F’s.
Look again, you probably missed the F’s that were part of the word “OF”. The reason is that you are such an expert that you translated the word as having a “V” sound and ignored the letter “F”.
Next time think about how close you are to your own processes and then wonder about what you aren’t seeing.
Listen to Gallaghers take on Language