While planning my summer reading lineup, I came across a review of Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons’s new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Crown, 2010).

The book details two forms of temporary visual impairment – “change blindness” and “inattentional blindness” – that really capture a couple of the shortcomings of the traditional budgeting process.

This review of the book inspired me to look up the original paper that the two psychologists published (the book is an outgrowth of this research).

Here’s how a portion of the paper’s abstract reads (the italics are mine):

“With each eye fixation, we experience a richly detailed visual world. Yet recent work on visual integration and change direction reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: We often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes (’change blindness’). Furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects (’inattentional blindness’). Taken together, these findings suggest that we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention.”

And here’s a portion of Paul Bloom’s book review that I mentioned above:

“The real problem here — what Chabris and Simons call ‘the illusion of attention’ — is that we are often unaware of these limitations; we think that we see the world as it really is, but ‘our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness.’ They go on to explore a series of related illusions having to do with perception, memory, knowledge, and ability, providing vivid examples of the real-world problems these illusions cause.”

Those of us in the field of corporate financial management know all about the real-world problems that the illusions of attention can cause; think about the “attention” the traditional budgeting process consumes – and the illusions about the future the cumbersome process sparks.

Until we come up with better ways to forecast and plan (iterative steps will do just fine), the traditional budget remains the gorilla in our midst. ###