Two Accounts Of One Arrangement Never Compared
Divergent accounts expand silently through unexamined assumptions until operational pressure forces a costly comparison during exit negotiations.
selective encoding
Meaning
Psychological filtering determines which details an observer notices and stores during a complex event. The mechanism of selective encoding explains why two founders walk out of the same meeting with two different views of what was decided. It occurs because the brain can only process a fraction of the data it receives.
Attention Bias
Focus on a specific goal leads a person to ignore information that seems irrelevant at the time. Selective encoding causes a founder to remember the praise from an investor while forgetting the warnings about the business model. This bias is a natural part of human cognition and not a deliberate act of deception.
Detail Loss
Omission of facts happens the moment the event occurs. Because of selective encoding, the initial record of a conversation is already incomplete by the time it is written down. This reality makes it necessary to have multiple people take notes or to record the session.
A comparison of these different notes shows where each person’s filter removed different pieces of the story.
Subjective Record
Accuracy in a history depends on recognizing the limits of the observer. Selective encoding means that no single memory is a perfect copy of the event. The only way to find the truth is to combine several different records into a single version.