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Tetris Effect
Leadership / Concepts · Added Apr 2026
What you practise seeing, you start seeing everywhere.
The Idea
Play Tetris long enough and you start seeing falling blocks when you close your eyes. The same happens with any repeated pattern: if you spend all day finding bugs, you start seeing problems in everything. If you practise gratitude, you start noticing things to be grateful for. Your brain tunes itself to whatever pattern it rehearses most.
Why It Matters
- Leaders who focus on problems train themselves to only see problems — and miss opportunities.
- Teams develop collective Tetris effects: a team that only does firefighting starts seeing fires everywhere.
- The effect shapes culture invisibly. What you repeatedly look for becomes what the team believes is real.
- It explains why optimists and pessimists can look at the same situation and see different things.
How to Apply
- Audit what patterns you're rehearsing. If you only review what went wrong, you're training a negative Tetris effect.
- Deliberately practise noticing what's working. It doesn't come naturally after a day of problem-solving.
- Rotate between different types of work — building, reviewing, planning — to avoid locking into one perceptual mode.
- After a stressful period, consciously reset. The crisis mindset lingers longer than the crisis.
The Trap
Forcing positivity to counteract the effect. The goal isn't to ignore problems — it's to see the full picture. A balanced Tetris effect notices both what's broken and what's working.
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