As change makers, do we go about change without being aware of our blind spots, overestimating our ability to do what is right? Are we acting unethically without meaning to do so?  Could you share yo

The confounding part of blind spots is we are, by definition, blind to them. Kiron's point about diverse teams is "spot" on. I personally try to watch for situations when I receive feedback that I don't like--that I don't agree with or think is wrong or unjustified. It may be all of those things! Or it may be that someone is shining a light on a blind spot, and the reason I'm chafing against it is because of how blind I am to the problem.

Quick example: I received an email from a podcast listener who said he hated the sound of the episodes he had listened to. He liked the content but not the sound quality. In part, I suspect, to a cultural difference, the way he worded his message came off as very direct (at best) and rude and insulting (at worst). My initial thoughts were probably along the lines of "well, 1.5 million other downloads think the sound is just fine, buddy!" But my more rational self wondered if this one person represented many others who didn't write.

To shorten the story, I had a number of interactions with the guy that led to some changes in our audio post-processing. The sound is objectively better and if it wasn't for a guy I almost wrote off, we wouldn't have improved.

That's a rare win for me--I fail more often, blindly.

The science is rather settled on blind spots. As Ulrich Boser says in his book Learn Better: "We often think we know more than we do. We overestimate our skills. We don't realize how much we don't know." Or, as Mark Twain said more humorously, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And perhaps that's where we might step into ethical problems without even realizing it....

Thanks for starting the discussion Amany....

When you have a blind spot while driving, how to resolve it? By look over your shoulder once in a while. Similarly in projects, doing due diligence and risk analysis isn't enough, we need to constantly assess the state of play as we we progress further into the project.

Any type of project may have blind spot, you need to be proactively looking.

A risk analysis could have a positive impact.

Agree with Vincent and Sante here, we all have blind spots and that's the reality. We need to build a team which is not afraid to warn us and raise issues and risk on time, that will help us to remain true to our objective and ethical.

Amany -

A follow-on thought. Assumptions & preconceived notions are a great example of a blind spot. The best way to combat these is to surface them. However, this requires the willingness to be transparent and vulnerable and psychological safety is still rare in many cross-functional teams...

Kiron

You have fewer blind spots if you increase your self awareness, and humility helps with that.
You are better known by others and trusted by them if you are honest.

So humility and honesty lead to authenticity and better leadership
(as was shown by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s).

As project mangers we are not change makers. We are people that are leading something to put in place a change into the organization. This is critical to understand to not fail. That is when each component inside the organization have to focus into their role. Generally speaking, if your organization is behind to create a transformation from the point of view of systemic thinking then each component must understand that each thing it is introduced will create a change into the whole architecture. But here is where we must return to the roles. Business analyst is on charge to deal with that.

I remember an example from past where we did a complete risk analysis of proposed org change and incorporated the mitigation actions into plan

Thank you Sergio. I guess seeing ourselves as Change Makers largely depends on where we see ourselves in the chain. We might be leading the production of a new product/system or we might be leading the rolling out of that product/system into the whole organisation - hence, no matter where we are in the chain, we are change makers! I was wondering if you have a personal story to share?