How Absence Blindness Affects You and Kills Team Morale

What if I told you that something you don’t see could be hurting your team and collaboration—and you might be doing it without even realizing it?

Absence blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us form recognizing what we cannot observe. Our perceptual faculties evoled to detect objects and events that are within our environment, but we struggle to notice what’s outisde our environment. As Josh Kaufman puts it in The Personal MBA:

It’s far more difficult for people to notice or identify what’s missing

A simple way to express this bias is: “If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” That sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Imagine your friend falls of his bike and arrives late to your meeting, would you say “Nah, bro, you’re lying” just because you didn’t witness it yourself?

That’s an obvious example, and you can already see how it could harm your relationship. But absence blindness can be much more subtle—yet equally damaging—especially in the workplace.

In a workplace, absence blindness often affects how people perceive “behind-the-scenes” work. When tasks and contributions aren’t immediately visible—especially operational roles that keep the “engine” running—they’re often seen as easier or less valuable.

For instance, programmers sometimes hear things like, “Oh, come on, coding is just writing some lines and adding semicolons—why is this project so expensive?” This mindset comes from absence blindness. Because the complexity isn’t visible, people assume it doesn’t exist. This can lead to unfair judgments, low morale, and resentment within teams.

Of course, it’s not easy to understand every role in an organization, especially those outside our own expertise. But instead of assuming a task is easy or trivial just because its complexity isn’t visible (you wouldn’t like it if you were working hard to meet your goals and someone said, “Oh, come on, that’s easy—just do more,” would you?), a better approach is to ask:

What is the goal this person trying to achieve?
What challenges do they face?
What could be improved?
What does their day-to-day work actually involve?

By asking instead of assuming, you avoid diminishing someone’s contributions. When people feel like their work is being judged as “trivial”, morale suffers, and collaboration weakens.

Let’s be the best version of ourselfes, let’s recognize our own absence blindness, seek understanding. Because when we dismiss what you don’t see, you don’t just undermine individuals, you lower the morale of the team.