A bug slipped through review.
The Team Lead spots it and thinks, “How did no one catch this?”
Maybe they even say it out loud. It’s tempting to believe the answer is simple:
“I pay more attention to detail.”
“I care more.”
“I just see things others miss.” Maybe all of that is true.
Or maybe… you were primed. Maybe you’ve seen this kind of issue before.
Maybe you had more context.
Maybe you were looking for exactly this kind of thing. Meanwhile, the reviewer wasn’t. This isn’t about talent or effort, it’s about how human attention works.
And it’s riddled with blind spots. A few cognitive biases at play:- Hindsight bias: Once we see the mistake, it feels like it should have been obvious all along.
- Selective attention: We notice what we’re primed to look for, and miss what we’re not.
- Fundamental attribution error: We assume others missed it because of carelessness, not because they were in a different mental frame.
- Confirmation bias: We overvalue what supports our view (“I knew it”) and ignore what doesn’t (“they should’ve known too”).
The danger isn’t in catching the bug.
It’s in assuming that catching it makes you the smartest person in the room — and that others need more oversight. That assumption kills trust.
It reinforces dependence.
And it skips the deeper question: What made this easy for me to spot, and hard for them? When you ask that, you stop reinforcing a hierarchy of judgment.
You start exploring the conditions for shared attention, better review, and stronger teams. Because clarity is almost always a postmortem phenomenon.
It only feels obvious after. Until next time,
Dermot
The Messy Middle ✉️ Enjoying The Messy Middle?
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