The Ethics of Perception

In a quiet clinic near Massachusetts General Hospital, I waited for prosthetic eyes, shells to cover the spaces war had left.

I stepped in. My white cane spoke first, a negotiation between what is visible and what is possible. My wife pointed out an open seat and sat opposite me, greeting someone beside her.

I said hello to the person next to me, and we began an easy conversation. Weather was our first refuge: cold, raw, a typical New England spring.

We spoke of the stillness of the clinic and how peaceful it felt. He said the staff here were good.

We did not speak of our injuries or our histories. I sensed only that he had come for a single shell, one eye undone.

On the way home, my wife was quiet until we crossed the bridge.

"Did you know," she asked, "the man you were speaking to in the waiting room was a prisoner? His hands and feet were shackled. The man next to me was the guard escorting him."

Startled, my morning suddenly rearranged itself. I had been completely unaware. I turned toward the bridge, reaching for what I might have missed.

"He must have done something violent to be bound like that," she said.

Then she paused.

"Maybe he had. Maybe he had not. Maybe he was simply caught inside the wrong moment."

Most of us are navigating some form of struggle, grief, or the quiet ache of unrealized potential. What I encountered that morning was not a criminal, but a man with a chill in his coat and a wound that needed healing. I had treated him as I would anyone else, without suspicion, without calculation. Without intending to, I had met him before his label arrived.

Blindness does not give many gifts. It takes light. It takes faces. It takes the shortcuts sight tempts us to make. But every now and then, it returns something. That day, it gave me the grace of ignorance, the privilege of engaging a human being rather than managing an assumption.

The moment forced me to confront how easily, in leadership and in life, we mistake biases for insight. This was not just a personal realization; it was a lesson in how judgment forms before truth has a chance to speak. How often do we confuse preconceptions for truth.

Reflecting on more than twenty-five years in management, I recognize how vulnerable leaders are to this impulse. Scanning titles, histories, and past mistakes, we are pressed to judge who is promising, who is risky, who belongs, who does not. In the clinic, I could not see the chains. In the office, we often go looking for them.

That day, I did not see chains. And because of that, I spoke to the man.

That, perhaps, was the rarest thing in the room.