Concentrated Focus and Repeat-Back Messages

When our focus is exceptionally concentrated and aimed exclusively on the task at hand, we can sometimes fail to hear what others are saying. 

In hyper-focus, people block out everything else around them and stay singularly centered on the undertaking, inadvertently ignoring commands, warnings, and pleas. The only downside of heightened concentration is a decrease in our ability to listen to and respond to others. 

High performers, highly productive and task-oriented team members, and those who excel at complex and intricate processes often suffer from missing messages and instructions. They become so fixated and focused on their performance that they fail to learn important changes in the job or mission. 

An intriguing example of this problem is illustrated by Operation RED FLAG, an intensely complicated US Air Force combat exercise that takes place in the skies above the vast Nevada desert. At RED FLAG, aircraft are tracked on a large digital map, with friendly aircraft depicted in blue and adversary aircraft displayed in red. Aircraft that are shot down become white dots; they are essentially ghosts.

In the melee of the aerial dogfight, it can come to pass that a pilot who is euphemistically “dead” misses the radio call notifying them of this reality. So they remain engaged in the fight, oblivious to the fact they have been “destroyed” and received direction to return to base and regenerate. 

“Raging Ghosts,” as they are called by exercise controllers, unnecessarily expend valuable resources and time while unaware that they were downed long ago by an enemy fighter or surface-to-air missile. The focus on the mission and the desire to compete create such an intense focus for Air Force pilots during the exercises that they flat-out miss the message that tells them to disengage. 

This commonly happens with highly skilled team members in other organizations, as well. When high performers in any enterprise become hyper-focused on the task in front of them, they quickly resemble Raging Ghosts and miss many of the messages critical to high execution.

Good leaders prize team members who can get into the zone of heightened concentration. However, effective leaders anticipate that those in the zone will likely block out any message or directive not smack in front of them. 

When they suspect a team member may fall prey to this focus trap, they ask them to repeat back any instruction, directive, or message. The failure to do so tells the leader instantaneously they must interrupt the performance and replay the message. 

The habit of asking others to verify that a message sent has been received through a repeat-back is popular in endeavors where the negative consequence of poor performance is severe, the required focus of performers is high, and changes in the environment can occur rapidly. 

We often think this process is the domain of military organizations and overlook the value of this practice in tasks such as mechanical repairs, kitchen prep and recipe execution, hospitality service, financial reporting and analysis, patient care, software testing, customer orders, and legal strategy, to name just a few. 

Good leaders introduce the process of repeat-back messaging in any area of an organization where concentrated focus can lead to disastrous outcomes when new instructions or messages are not incorporated into a given performance. What tasks and arenas in your organization would benefit from a repeat-back process?