Scotomas: The Missing Perspectives That Unlock the Best in Your People
The word comes from the Greek. Scotoma. It means hidden assumptions or perception gaps.
In medicine, a scotoma is an area of diminished or absent vision within the visual field. You cannot see it because the nature of perception gaps is that you don't know it's there. The brain fills in the gap with what it expects to find, and you move through the world believing you are seeing clearly.
In leadership, scotoma may be the single most expensive problem in organizations today. And it is almost entirely invisible.
A Story About Perception Gaps
I was brought in to work with a senior leadership team at a large, well-resourced organization. These were sharp, thoughtful people, genuinely committed to their values and to their employees. They had done trainings. Updated policies. Built dashboards. And they could not understand why engagement scores for employees of color, employees with disabilities, and employees in non-management roles kept coming back low.
Year after year.
In our first session together, I asked them: "What is your theory for why this keeps happening?"
The answers were thoughtful. But they all shared a common thread: the problem was framed as something happening to the organization from outside. The labor market. Generational attitudes. Industry-wide trends.
Nobody framed it as something they might not be considering.
That is the scotoma at work. Not an absence of effort or intention. A gap in perspective.
The Neuroscience of Perception Gaps
Your brain processes approximately 11 million bits of information per second. Your conscious mind handles roughly 40. The gap between those two numbers is not random, it is managed by your Reticular Activating System (RAS), which filters information based on what you have already decided is true, important, and relevant.
Which means: if you believe your culture is inclusive, your brain will scan for evidence that confirms that belief. You will notice the town halls, the ERGs, the policy updates. You will miss the microaggressions in the hallway. The meeting where someone's idea was credited to someone else. The promotion cycle that produces the same demographic profile year after year.
You are not lying when you say you don't see it. You genuinely don't. The scotoma is real.
But the organizational cost of that perception gap is also real.
Where Scotoma Hides in Leadership
In my work across industries and continents, I've identified several places where leadership scotoma most commonly hides:
Hiring and promotion — the belief that you are selecting "the best candidate" while consistently selecting candidates who resemble the existing leadership team.
Feedback and development — investing coaching dollars and stretch assignments in people who "seem ready" by criteria that were never examined for bias.
Culture assessment — reading engagement survey results through the lens of what you hoped to find, rather than what the data is actually saying.
Innovation — missing the brilliant ideas that never made it out of the hallway because the people who had them didn't feel safe in the meeting.
Expanding Your Perspectives
The answer to scotoma is not guilt. It is not performative apology. It is the disciplined, intentional practice of expanding your perspective regularly and structurally.
Here is what that looks like:
Build feedback channels where people can tell you what you're missing and where they believe you will actually act on it. Anonymous surveys help, but the real test is what happens when people give feedback face-to-face.
Treat data that challenges your narrative as more important than data that confirms it. The uncomfortable number is almost always the more important one.
Seek out perspectives that are structurally different from your own. Not just different opinions, but different lived experiences, different organizational positions, different relationships with power.
Build teams that are genuinely diverse in experience and background, not because of optics, but because different lenses see different things. A room full of people who all moved through the world the same way will have the same gaps in perspectives.
The most dangerous leader is not the one who asks hard questions. It is the one who has convinced themselves they already have all the answers, and built a culture where no one feels safe telling them otherwise.
Your scotoma is not the problem. Refusing to look for it is.
WANT TO GO DEEPER?
Scotomas, personal and organizational, are a central theme in the Potential Unleashed LevelUP Workshop and throughout IDEAL: From Overcoming to Becoming. Visit potential-unleashed.com to bring this work to your team, or to book Jahmad for your next keynote or leadership event.