Why we miss the obvious under pressure

There was another injured person in the vehicle, and none of us had noticed.

I recently completed a Wilderness First Responder course, where much of our training involved working through realistic emergency scenarios. We practised assessing injuries, making decisions, communicating with one another and managing situations where several things needed our attention at the same time.

One of the scenarios involved a car accident with multiple casualties. We got to work assessing the injured people, trying to establish who needed help first and figuring out how to manage the situation. Everyone was involved, concentrating on their tasks and doing their best to help.

Somewhere in all that activity, we'd forgotten to make sure the vehicles were properly immobilised. We also hadn't established whether everyone involved in the accident had been accounted for.

As it turned out, there was another casualty in the back of the bakkie (South African pick-up truck) whom we'd completely missed.

What stayed with me afterwards was how easily it had happened. We'd been taught to assess the scene, identify potential hazards and establish what we were dealing with before becoming absorbed in patient care. We understood why those steps were important. Yet once we were in the middle of the simulation, our attention went straight to the people who obviously needed help.

I kept returning to that thought, partly because it made me wonder how often we overlook things in everyday life while feeling reasonably confident that we know what's going on.

When our attention becomes too focused

Our brains are constantly deciding what deserves our attention. There's far more information around us than we can consciously process, so we rely on expectations, previous experiences and what seems most relevant to the situation to determine where we focus.

Most of the time, this works remarkably well. Without that ability to filter information, we'd struggle to concentrate on anything. But our attention can also become so absorbed in one part of a situation that we fail to register other things happening around us.

Psychologists sometimes refer to this as attentional tunnelling. It describes the tendency for attention to become concentrated on a limited set of information, sometimes at the expense of other relevant cues. It has been studied in demanding environments such as aviation and emergency response, where maintaining awareness of the wider situation can be particularly important.

Stress can contribute to this narrowing of attention, although its effects are more complicated than we sometimes assume. The nature of the task, our experience, the intensity of the pressure and the resources available to us all influence how we respond.

I can't say exactly which of these factors contributed most to our mistake during the simulation. We may simply have become absorbed in patient care before completing a proper scene assessment. But the experience made the limitations of our attention very tangible.

The injured people were visible, and helping them gave us something immediate and concrete to do. Meanwhile, the questions we hadn't asked and the hazards we hadn't checked were much less apparent.

And because we were busy responding to what we could see, there was little to alert us to what we'd overlooked.

I think that's one of the more uncomfortable aspects of human attention. We can be deeply engaged in something, concentrating hard and making decisions that seem entirely sensible, while our understanding of the situation remains incomplete.

When everyone is looking in the same direction

Something else about the simulation interested me. There were several of us involved, all bringing our own knowledge and observations to the situation, yet we'd collectively overlooked the same things.

You might expect that having more people involved would make it easier to notice everything. And often it does. Different perspectives, experiences and areas of expertise can help teams identify information that one person might miss. But groups can also develop shared blind spots.

Once a team has formed an understanding of what's happening, that understanding can begin to shape where everyone directs their attention. People organise themselves around the tasks that seem most important, conversations become focused on solving the identified problem, and assumptions can go unexamined simply because nobody has thought to question them.

This doesn't necessarily mean people are agreeing with one another uncritically. Sometimes everyone is so occupied with their part of the work that nobody has responsibility for maintaining an overview.

I've been thinking about how familiar this can feel in organisations. Imagine a team dealing with a project that's running significantly behind schedule. The situation is becoming urgent, and everyone is working hard to get things back on track. Meetings are arranged, responsibilities are reassigned, progress is monitored more closely and people put in extra hours.

There may be genuine improvements as a result of those efforts. But it's also possible that the team has become so focused on recovering the schedule that nobody is questioning whether the original plan was realistic, or whether the way the project is being managed is contributing to the delays.

Everyone can be working towards the same goal, with considerable effort and good intentions, while overlooking information that could change their understanding of the problem.

I think this becomes especially interesting when we consider how organisations tend to reward responsiveness. We value people who take initiative, solve problems quickly and keep things moving. Being busy and visibly engaged can create a sense of progress, both for ourselves and for the people around us.

Yet activity doesn't always tell us how well we understand the situation we're responding to.

Sometimes the people who are most deeply involved in solving a problem have the least opportunity to stand back and question the assumptions guiding their work. And when everyone around them is equally absorbed, it can be difficult for anyone to recognise that something important has been left out.

The influence of pressure on how we think

My interest in this also comes from the work I do around stress, self-awareness and the nervous system.

We often discuss pressure in terms of how much someone can handle, whether they remain calm or how well they perform when things become demanding. But our responses to pressure involve changes in both our bodies and our cognitive processes.

When we perceive a situation as challenging or threatening, our nervous system helps mobilise us to respond. Depending on the circumstances, we might notice changes in breathing, heart rate, muscle tension or alertness. These responses help prepare us for action, and a certain level of arousal can support performance, particularly when a task requires energy, focus and quick reactions.

As demands increase, however, some aspects of thinking can become more difficult. Research has shown that acute stress can affect working memory and cognitive flexibility, including our ability to hold information in mind, adjust our approach and consider alternatives. The effects vary considerably between people and situations.

I find this relevant to the expectations we place on ourselves and others at work. We expect leaders to listen carefully, make thoughtful decisions, recognise emerging risks and remain aware of how their behaviour affects the people around them. We expect teams to communicate clearly, collaborate effectively and adapt when circumstances change.

These are all reasonable expectations, but they're also skills that can become harder to apply when someone is overloaded, exhausted or feeling under threat. A person might understand the importance of listening and still interrupt or become defensive during a difficult conversation. A manager might genuinely value different perspectives but become increasingly directive when a project starts going wrong. A team might know that it needs to reassess its priorities but become so caught up in responding to immediate demands that it never creates the opportunity.

I've experienced versions of this in my own working life, particularly the tendency to become more absorbed in solving something when the pressure increases. There's a certain comfort in having a task to focus on, especially when the wider situation feels uncertain. But that focus can also make it harder to notice when the approach we're taking needs to change.

Becoming more aware of our own responses to pressure can help us recognise these patterns earlier. We might notice that we're rushing, becoming unusually rigid in our thinking, struggling to take in what someone is saying or feeling an increasing need to control the situation.

Of course, awareness alone doesn't guarantee that we'll make a better decision. The environment we're working in, the support available to us and the systems we rely on are equally important.

Still, understanding how our state can influence our behaviour gives us another opportunity to question what might be happening before we become completely absorbed in it.

Learning to widen our perspective

One of the things I appreciated most about the Wilderness First Responder course was the opportunity to practise in situations where things didn't always go according to plan.

In a classroom, it's relatively straightforward to discuss the importance of assessing a scene before approaching a patient. You can explain the procedure, understand the reasoning behind it and feel confident that you'll remember it.

Working through a simulation introduces other demands. People need help, decisions have consequences within the exercise, and your attention is divided between several things happening at once. You begin to discover which parts of your knowledge you can apply almost automatically and which require more deliberate attention. And I think there's enormous value in this kind of learning, and I'd love to see more of it in professional development.

We spend a lot of time teaching people what effective leadership, communication and decision-making should look like. There are frameworks, workshops, courses and books explaining how to manage difficult conversations, resolve conflict and respond to uncertainty. But understanding those ideas intellectually doesn't necessarily mean we'll be able to apply them when we're under pressure.

Imagine practising a difficult conversation with someone who becomes defensive, or working through a scenario where a team has to make decisions with incomplete information and competing priorities. Afterwards, there could be an opportunity to reflect on what people noticed, what they assumed and how their responses influenced one another.

These exercises could reveal patterns that are difficult to recognise in ordinary working life, where we're usually more concerned with getting through the situation than examining how we're behaving within it.

There's also a role for the structures and habits that support good decisions. In emergency response, procedures and systematic assessments help reduce the likelihood of overlooking essential information. They're particularly valuable because they don't depend entirely on someone remembering every detail while managing a demanding situation.

Organisations can create similar opportunities to maintain perspective. Teams can establish regular points to reassess their assumptions, encourage people to raise concerns that don't fit the prevailing view, and make sure someone is paying attention to the wider picture while others concentrate on immediate tasks.

For leaders, this might also involve becoming more comfortable with asking questions that interrupt the momentum of a discussion. Are we sure we understand what's happening? What information haven't we considered? Is there someone who might be seeing this differently?

Those questions can feel inconvenient when everyone is eager to move forward, particularly when deadlines are approaching. But the willingness to revisit our understanding of a situation can be just as valuable as the ability to act decisively.

What we don't realise we're missing

I've returned to that car accident simulation several times in my thoughts since the course.

I keep coming back to how ordinary our behaviour felt while we were in the middle of it. We were trying to help, applying what we'd learned and working together to manage a difficult situation. There was nothing particularly unusual about the way our attention went to the injured people in front of us. And maybe that's why the experience has stayed with me.

It's easy to recognise a mistake once someone points it out. The more difficult part is recognising that our understanding might be incomplete while we're still in the middle of making decisions.

In everyday life, we rarely have someone standing nearby who can reveal the person we've overlooked or the hazard we haven't considered. We simply continue working with the information we have, often without knowing what else we should be looking for.

I've started thinking more about the situations in which I become particularly focused on getting something right, solving a problem or meeting an expectation. I wonder what happens to my attention in those moments, and whether I leave enough room to notice things that don't fit with what I'm already doing.

It's something I want to become more conscious of, both in my own life and in the way I work with others. The course reminded me how valuable it is to practise stepping outside our immediate focus, especially when we're convinced we're doing exactly what the situation requires.

After all, we knew how to assess the injured people in front of us. We just hadn't realised there was someone else we needed to find.

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