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Every decision has edges. Before you weigh a single option, your attention has already settled what counts as relevant, and anything outside that line is never weighed at all.
Bazerman and Chugh built the idea on Herbert Simon's bounded rationality, the recognition that a mind can only process so much. They moved the limit one step earlier, to what reaches the decision in the first place.
The cost is that nothing feels missing. A decision built on half the relevant information feels as complete as one built on all of it, because you can't sense the weight of something you never looked at.
It's worth separating from confirmation bias. Confirmation bias shapes how you read the evidence in front of you. Bounded awareness works earlier, on what made it in front of you at all.
For a leader, the tell is how calm the decision feels. You decide quickly, nobody raises a gap, and the confidence seems earned because the frame you used has served you before.
That's also why seniority doesn't protect you. The further a decision sits from the work, the more of its information arrives already filtered, and each filter sets its own edges before yours.
It's why a post-mortem that only examines the options you weighed will miss the cause every time.
Sales started to slide in 2013, the year we could finally see everything. Our new business intelligence platform pulled in every scrap of data, and the unit managers who used to carry four numbers in their heads (sales, margin, stock cover and that week's trend) lost them under a thousand others. Every report we pulled supported one explanation and contradicted the last. It took a leadership team meeting to crack it open, when our sales director finally lost patience: "I don't want more data; I want four numbers. Stop looking for reasons and start taking action."