Roya Bloom

Have you ever decided that you want to buy a red car, and suddenly red cars seem to be everywhere?

You drive to work and notice three. You see one outside a restaurant. Another passes you at a traffic light. Later that evening, you notice another one parked around the corner.

You might think, “Where did all these red cars come from?”

They were already there.

You simply started noticing them.

This simple observation is often called the Red Car Theory. It is not a formal scientific theory, but it is a useful way to understand something important about human attention: once something becomes relevant to us, we tend to notice it more.

And that has a surprisingly powerful lesson for leadership.

Because leaders are constantly surrounded by information, problems, opportunities, risks, ideas and people. The question is not whether these things are present.

The question is:

What are you paying attention to?

Your focus determines what you notice. What you notice influences what you consider possible. And what you consider possible influences the decisions you make.

That means leadership is partly the art of directing attention.

Your Brain Cannot Notice Everything

At any given moment, your environment contains far more information than you can consciously process.

You can hear conversations around you, see hundreds of objects, notice facial expressions, read signs, process sounds and receive notifications. Yet your conscious attention can only deal with a small part of this information at any one time.

Your brain therefore has to filter.

This filtering is essential. Without it, everyday life would be overwhelming.

One mechanism involved in this process is selective attention. We tend to focus on information that is relevant to our current goals, interests or expectations while ignoring much of everything else.

A classic example is the cocktail party effect. You may be surrounded by dozens of conversations, yet if someone across the room says your name, you are suddenly aware of it.

The sound did not suddenly become louder.

It became relevant.

The same thing happens with the red car.

Once red cars become relevant, your attention becomes more likely to pick them out of the enormous amount of visual information surrounding you.

This does not mean that your brain is creating red cars.

It means that you have become better at noticing them.

And this distinction is extremely important for leaders.

Leaders See What They Train Themselves to See

Imagine two managers walking through the same office.

The first manager is focused on problems.

They notice the missed deadline, the employee who looks distracted, the unfinished project and the customer complaint.

The second manager is focused on opportunities.

They notice an employee who has developed an interesting solution, a process that could be improved, a customer asking for something the company does not currently offer and two colleagues who seem to be collaborating particularly well.

They are walking through the same office.

They are looking at the same people.

They are experiencing the same organization.

But they are not seeing the same workplace.

This is the leadership lesson behind the Red Car Theory.

Your attention influences your perception of reality.

That does not mean you can simply decide to ignore problems and everything will become positive.

Good leadership requires the ability to see problems clearly.

But if your attention is permanently focused on what is wrong, you may become blind to what is possible.

The Problem With Problem Focus

Organizations naturally produce problems.

• A customer complains.
• A project is late.
• Someone makes a mistake.
• Revenue falls.
• A competitor launches something new.
• An employee resigns.
• A system breaks.

These things demand attention, and leaders need to respond.

The problem begins when responding to problems becomes the default mode of leadership. A leader can become so accustomed to looking for what is wrong that they stop seeing what is working. That has consequences. Employees notice what their leaders notice.

If the only time a manager speaks to someone is when something goes wrong, people quickly learn what receives attention. If mistakes are discussed for thirty minutes but successful experiments receive a quick “good job,” employees learn another lesson.

They learn that avoiding mistakes is more important than finding better solutions.

Over time, this can create a defensive culture. People stop taking risks. They stop suggesting unusual ideas. They stop experimenting. They do what is safe. The leader wanted fewer problems. They got fewer ideas.

What You Notice Becomes More Visible

There is an important psychological principle underneath this.

When you have a specific goal, your attention becomes more sensitive to information related to that goal.

Researchers have studied related phenomena through concepts such as selective attention, attentional bias and goal directed attention.

One particularly interesting example is research by Tversky and Kahneman on how people use mental shortcuts when making judgments. Our attention and decisions are influenced by what information is most accessible to us, which can affect how we interpret situations and make decisions.

This means leaders should be careful about the questions they repeatedly ask.

If you constantly ask:

“What went wrong?”

your organization will become very good at finding problems.

If you also ask:

“What worked?”

“What surprised us?”

“What opportunity are we not seeing?”

“What is working better than expected?”

you create another attentional pattern.

You start looking for your red cars.

Focus Does Not Create Opportunities. It Helps You See Them.

This is an important distinction.

The Red Car Theory should not be interpreted as magical thinking. Focusing on opportunities does not make opportunities appear from nowhere. But opportunities may already exist without receiving your attention.

Imagine a company that has thousands of customers. One customer repeatedly asks for a service the company does not currently provide. The request is treated as an annoying exception. Nothing happens.

Now imagine the leadership team starts asking:

“What are our customers repeatedly asking us for that we do not currently offer?”

Suddenly, the same information looks different. The customer complaint has become market research. The unusual request has become a possible product idea. The problem has not changed. The question has changed.

And the question determines what people start looking for.

The Questions Leaders Ask Become Organizational Filters

This may be one of the most powerful leadership lessons in the entire idea.

A leader’s questions influence the attention of the entire team.

Consider a Monday morning meeting.

A leader asks:

“What problems did we have last week?”

The team starts searching its memory for problems.

Now imagine the leader asks:

“What did we learn last week?”

The conversation changes.

Ask:

“Where did we lose time?”

People look for inefficiencies.

Ask:

“Where did we create unexpected value?”

People look for opportunities.

Ask:

“Which customer behaviour surprised us?”

People start paying attention to customers.

Ask:

“What are competitors doing that we should understand?”

People start watching the market.

The organization begins to develop a collective attention system.

This is why leadership is not just about making decisions.

Leaders influence what other people notice.

The Red Car Theory and Innovation

Innovation requires noticing things that other people ignore.

A new idea often starts with something small.

• A customer behaves differently.
• A process feels unnecessarily complicated.
• A new technology appears.
• A competitor changes its strategy.
• An employee finds a shortcut.
• A product is being used in an unexpected way.

None of these things automatically becomes an innovation. Someone has to notice. This is where focus becomes powerful.

If your organization is explicitly looking for new customer needs, employees are more likely to notice unusual customer behaviour. If you are looking for ways to reduce unnecessary work, employees are more likely to notice repetitive processes. If you are looking for new applications for AI, people become more attentive to tasks that are repetitive, information heavy or inefficient. The opportunity may have been present for months. The organization simply was not looking for it.

The Leadership Danger: Confirmation Bias

There is, however, a darker side to the Red Car Theory.

If you start looking for red cars, you will notice red cars.

But that does not mean there are more red cars than other colours.

This is where leaders need to be careful.

Selective attention can help us notice relevant information, but it can also contribute to confirmation bias.

Once we believe something, we tend to pay more attention to information that supports our belief and less attention to information that challenges it. A leader who believes a new strategy will work may notice every positive signal.

They may overlook negative customer feedback. A leader who believes an employee is underperforming may notice every mistake while ignoring improvements. A leader who believes remote work is damaging productivity may notice every problem associated with remote work while overlooking evidence that some teams perform well remotely.

The Red Car Theory therefore has two sides.

Focus helps you notice what matters. But focus can also make you miss what does not fit your expectations.

Great leaders need both focus and curiosity.

Focus Without Curiosity Becomes Blindness

Imagine looking through a camera lens.

A narrow focus gives you detail. But you lose the wider picture. Leadership needs both. You need enough focus to know what matters. But you also need enough openness to notice something unexpected.

This is particularly important in a rapidly changing environment. AI is a good example. A company might focus entirely on how AI can reduce costs. That focus could produce valuable efficiencies.

But it might also cause the organization to miss opportunities to create entirely new products or services. Another company might focus entirely on AI innovation. It could develop impressive technology while missing the fact that customers simply want a simpler experience.

Both companies are focused.

Neither necessarily sees the whole picture.

The best leaders regularly change the question.

They know what they are looking for, but they remain open to discovering something they were not looking for.

What Does This Mean for Leadership?

The practical lesson is surprisingly simple. If you want your team to notice something, talk about it. If you want people to see opportunities, ask about opportunities. If you want employees to think about customers, bring customer behaviour into conversations. If you want people to identify risks early, create an environment where raising concerns is encouraged. If you want innovation, ask people what they have noticed that does not make sense.

You are effectively telling the organization:

“These are the things worth paying attention to.”

Over time, people become more sensitive to those signals.

This is not manipulation.

It is how attention works.

Every organization has limited attention. Leaders help decide where some of that attention goes.

Try the Red Car Exercise

You can test this with your own team.

At the beginning of the week, choose one thing you want people to notice.

• It could be customer needs.
• It could be unnecessary meetings.
• It could be opportunities to use AI.
• It could be examples of excellent teamwork.
• It could be risks that are developing quietly.

Do not create a complicated reporting system.

Simply tell your team:

“This week, I want us to pay particular attention to X. At the end of the week, let’s share what we noticed.”

Then wait.

You may be surprised by what comes back.

Someone might say, “I noticed three customers asking for the same feature.”

Another person might say, “I realized we spend twenty minutes every morning doing something that could be automated.”

Someone else might say, “I noticed that our newest employee has a much simpler way of doing this.”

These observations may have existed before.

Now they have a place to go.

Your Team’s Attention Is a Limited Resource

We often talk about time as a scarce resource.

But attention may be just as important.

A team can have eight hours available and still accomplish very little if its attention is constantly fragmented.

• Meetings.
• Notifications.
• Emails.
• Messages.
• Urgent requests.
• Changing priorities.
• Conflicting instructions.

A leader who continuously changes what deserves attention creates an organization that is constantly looking for a new red car.

People start one task. Then another becomes urgent. Then another. Eventually, employees are busy but directionless. Good leadership therefore requires protecting attention. Not every problem deserves immediate attention. Not every email deserves an instant response. Not every opportunity deserves investigation.

The leader’s job is partly to say:

This matters.

This can wait.

This is not important.

This is where we should look.

That clarity can be incredibly powerful.

The Red Car Theory and Remote Leadership

The idea becomes even more interesting when teams work remotely.

When people are physically separated, leaders have fewer opportunities to observe what is happening naturally.

They cannot simply walk around and notice something.

This makes intentional attention even more important.

A remote leader might ask team members to share one thing they noticed during the week.

One customer insight.

One process problem.

One opportunity.

One example of excellent work.

One thing that surprised them.

These small observations can become a substitute for some of the informal information that naturally occurs in an office.

More importantly, they create a culture where noticing becomes part of the job.

The leader is saying:

I do not just want you to complete tasks. I want you to pay attention to what is happening around you.

That is a much more powerful expectation.

Leaders Should Also Change What They Look For

There is another practical lesson.

Do not always look for the same red car.

If you spend six months looking only for problems, you may become excellent at finding problems.

But you may become terrible at noticing opportunities.

So change the question.

One week, look for inefficiencies. The next, look for customer signals. Then look for hidden talent. Then look for risks. Then look for unexpected successes. Then look for behaviours that should be repeated.

This creates a broader attentional range.

You are still focused.

But you are not trapped in one perspective.

What About the Red Cars You Do Not See?

This may be the most important question.

If you are seeing red cars everywhere, what are you missing?

Blue cars. Green cars. Bicycles. Pedestrians. Road signs. Something happening in the distance.

The same thing happens in organizations.

When leaders become obsessed with one metric, one strategy or one problem, everything else becomes less visible.

• A company focused exclusively on revenue may overlook employee burnout.
• A company focused exclusively on innovation may overlook operational problems.
• A company focused exclusively on efficiency may overlook customer experience.
• A company focused exclusively on growth may overlook risk.
• A company focused exclusively on employee satisfaction may overlook performance.

Leadership is therefore not about focusing on everything.

That is impossible.

It is about knowing what deserves focus now, while regularly checking what your focus may be hiding.

The Red Car Question

The next time you walk into a meeting, take a moment before you begin.

Ask yourself:

• What am I looking for?
• Am I looking for problems?
• Opportunities?
• Mistakes?
• Evidence that my strategy is working?
• Evidence that it is failing?
• People who need help?
• People who are ready for more responsibility?

The answer matters because you will probably notice more of whatever you are looking for.

Then ask a second question:

What might I be missing?

That second question is what protects you from becoming trapped by your own attention.

The Real Leadership Lesson

The Red Car Theory is not really about red cars.

It is about attention.

As a leader, you are constantly deciding what deserves attention, both consciously and unconsciously. Your team watches what you ask about, what you praise, what you measure and what you repeatedly discuss. Over time, those signals influence what the organization notices.

If you only look for problems, you will find plenty. If you deliberately look for opportunities, you will start seeing them too. But the strongest leaders do something more sophisticated. They focus without becoming narrow. They search for opportunities without ignoring risks. They listen for positive signals without dismissing negative ones. They know what they want to see, but they remain curious about what they cannot yet see.

That is the real lesson.

Your focus does not change the world around you. It changes what you are able to notice in it.

And sometimes, the opportunity you have been waiting for is not something that suddenly appears.

It has been driving past you for months.

You just were not looking for it.

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A Simple Leadership Exercise for This Week

Choose one question and ask your team to think about it for the next seven days:

• What are our customers telling us that we are not listening to?
• What is taking more time than it should?
• What is working surprisingly well?
• Where are we seeing an opportunity that nobody is talking about?
• What problem keeps appearing that we have accepted as normal?
• What are our competitors doing that we should understand better?

At the end of the week, compare what everyone noticed.

You may discover that your organization is surrounded by red cars.

The real question is whether you have trained people to see them.