Common Sense is Not so Common

Isaac Asimov wrote, in I, Robot, “It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time.  People say, ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’  But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”

A nose sits directly in the centre of a person’s own field of vision, permanently, and yet nobody notices it without deliberate effort or an external reflection.  Asimov’s point is not that obvious truths are rare.  It is that proximity blinds a person to exactly the things closest to him, and that no amount of staring harder solves the problem.  What solves it is a mirror, something external, reflecting what internal perspective structurally cannot see on its own.

The Case That Proves This at a Cost

Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician working at Vienna General Hospital in 1847, noticed that maternity patients delivered by doctors and medical students died of childbed fever at roughly triple the rate of those delivered by midwives.  He traced the difference to a specific, obvious-in-hindsight cause: doctors were performing autopsies before delivering babies, without washing their hands between the two.  He introduced a chlorinated lime handwashing protocol, and mortality rates in his ward fell from around 18% to under 2% within months.

The medical establishment did not thank him.  It ridiculed him.  Doctors of the era found the idea that their own hands, the hands of educated gentlemen, could carry disease from a corpse to a labouring mother, professionally insulting rather than clinically obvious.  Dr. Semmelweis was dismissed from his position, and died in 1865 in an asylum, having been committed against his will, beaten by guards, from an infected wound eerily similar to the disease he had spent his career trying to prevent.  Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, developed decades later, finally vindicated him posthumously.  The obvious truth had been sitting in plain view, as plain as the nose on the entire medical profession’s face, and an entire discipline could not see it until a mirror, in this case, decades of continued unnecessary death, was forced up against it.

Why This Still Happens in Every Boardroom

Organisations run on exactly this same blindness.  A failing process survives for years because everyone inside the organisation is too close to it to see what an outsider would flag within a single meeting.  This is why external consultants, fresh hires, and blunt junior employees occasionally spot in their first week what a company’s own leadership has failed to notice across a decade.  They are not smarter.  They are simply not standing close enough to the nose to have stopped seeing it.

Every person carries a version of Dr. Semmelweis’s blind spot, some obvious flaw in judgement, habit, or method that everyone around him can see and he cannot, precisely because it sits too close for his own perspective to register it.  Asimov’s mirror is not a comfortable metaphor.  It is a demand: seek out whatever function, whoever, or whatever the equivalent honest reflection happens to be, before the obvious truth costs as much as it cost an entire generation of mothers who never got the chance to meet Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’s successor.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code