Attention blindness is key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our institutions, in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves. It plays a part in our interactions with inanimate objects like car keys or computer screens and in how we value—and often devalue—the intelligence of children, people with disabilities, those from other cultures, or even ourselves as we age. It plays a part in interpersonal relations at home and in the office, in cultural misunderstandings, and even in dangerous global political confrontations.

For the last decade, I’ve been exploring effective ways that we can make use of one another’s blind spots so that, collectively, we have the best chance of success. Because of attention blindness, we often arrive at a standstill when it comes to tackling important issues, not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are precisely right in what they see but neither can see what the other does. Each side becomes more and more urgent in one direction, oblivious to what is causing such consternation in another. In normal conditions, neither knows the other perspective exists. We saw this in the summer of 2010 when an explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sent nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Some people reacted to the environmental disaster by wanting all offshore oil drilling banned forever. Others protested about the loss of jobs for oil workers in the area when the president of the United States declared a six-month moratorium on oil drilling to investigate what had gone so disastrously wrong. It was as if neither side could see the other.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we can learn how to share our perspectives, we can see the whole picture. That may sound easy, but as a practical matter, it involves figuring a way out of our own minds, which as the gorilla experiment so perfectly demonstrates, is a pretty powerful thing to have standing in the way. Yet with practice and the right methods, we can learn to see the way in which attention limits our perspectives. After all, we learned how to pay attention in the first place. We learned the patterns that convinced us to see in a certain way. That means we can also unlearn those patterns. Once we do, we’ll have the freedom to learn new, collective ways that serve us and lead to our success.

What does it mean to say that we learn to pay attention? It means no one is born with innate knowledge of how to focus or what to focus on. Infants track just about anything and everything and have no idea that one thing counts as more worthy of attention than another. They eventually learn because we teach them, from the day they are born, what we consider to be important enough to focus on. That baby rattle that captivates their attention in the first weeks after they’re born isn’t particularly interesting to them when they’re two or twenty or fifty because they’ve learned that rattles aren’t that important to anyone but a baby. Everything works like that. Learning is the constant disruption of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old. And then the process starts again.

This book offers a positive, practical, and even hopeful story about attention in our digital age. It uses research in brain science, education, and workplace psychology to find the best ways to learn and change in challenging times. It showcases inventive educators who are using gaming strategy and other collaborative methods to transform how kids learn in the digital age, and it highlights a number of successful innovators who have discarded worn-out business practices in order to make the most of the possibilities difference and disruption afford in a new, interconnected world.