If a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked in front of you, stopped, beat his chest, and then continued on his merry way, would you notice?

Before answering this question, consider the famous gorilla video. The video shows a group of people wearing either black or white shirts passing a basketball back and forth. The viewer is told to track how many times the players in the white shirts pass the ball. After about 30 seconds, a person wearing a gorilla suit strolls to the center of the screen, pounds his chest and walks away. Most viewers are so engaged in the task of counting ball passes that they fail to notice the chest thumping ape.  It’s as if the guerilla was invisible. It doesn’t register.

A second experiment produced similar results. Twenty-four experienced radiologists were asked to look for cancerous lung nodules on a series of scans. Researchers had inserted a gorilla the size of a matchbook in one of the scans. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists missed it! Professionals who are trained to notice anything that looks amiss didn’t see it.

As the research demonstrates, people often miss what occurs right before their eyes. This phenomenon is known as “in-attentional blindness.” When we focus on one thing, we can become blind to others.

An article in Smithsonian Magazine explains:

“How could people miss something right before their eyes? This form of invisibility depends not on the limits of the eye, but on the limits of the mind. We consciously see only a small subset of our visual world, and when our attention is focused on one thing, we fail to notice other, unexpected things around us—including those we might want to see.”

If you automatically assume that you would have seen the gorilla in either scenario, think again.  Your smartphone demonstrates the power of  inattentional blindness and how it operates in everyday ways.  Consider what you miss when your eyes are glued to that tiny screen. This joke says it all: Dance like nobody is watching. Because they’re not. They’re checking their phones

What makes some people more successful than others? Top network scientists have an answer. They found that half of the difference in career success is due to one variable.

Journalist Michael Simmons explains:

The bottom line? According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success.

How do we define an open network?

To understand the power of open networks, it’s important to understand their opposite. Most people spend their careers in closed networks; networks of people who already know each other. People often stay in the same industry, the same religion, and the same political party. In a closed network, it’s easier to get things done because you’ve built up trust, and you know all the shorthand terms and unspoken rules. It’s comfortable because the group converges on the same ways of seeing the world that confirm your own.

In other words, a closed network is full of like-minded types who agree with one another. Although a closed network may be comfortable, the downside is that it limits exposure to new ways of thinking and seeing the world.

In comparison, people in open networks are constantly exposed to new people, experiences and ideas. This may be challenging but there are clear advantages of assimilating different and conflicting perspectives.

Simmons outlines four benefits of an open network:

1. A more accurate view of the world:

It provides people with the ability to pull information from diverse clusters so errors cancel themselves out. Research shows that people in open networks are better forecasters of future trends than people in closed networks

2. Ability to control the timing of information sharing:

While open networkers may not be the first to hear information, they are usually the first to introduce information to another cluster. As a result, they can leverage the first move advantage

3. Ability to serve as a translator / connector between groups:

People in open networks create value by serving as intermediaries and connecting people and organizations that can help each other

4. More breakthrough ideas:

People in open networks are more likely to create atypical combinations. For example, research shows that the top performing academic studies have references from outside their primary field.

In open networks, people, ideas, experiences and disciplines intersect and cross-pollinate. The diversity of experience provides perspective and insight. It’s about connecting the dots in unexpected ways. It takes courage and curiosity to bust out of the comfort zone of a closed network but the rewards are worth it.

Steve Jobs describes it best:

A lot of people…haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I would say it makes for a more interesting life too.