The Gorilla Protocol
An Authentic Practice with Right Attention Protocol: Developing the capacity to see what measurement frameworks make invisible.
What this is for: Developing the capacity to maintain peripheral awareness when a measurement framework has captured attention — to notice what the framework excludes while still working effectively within it. The practitioner learns to hold the measured and the unmeasured simultaneously, so that what the framework cannot show does not disappear from awareness entirely.
When to use: When success indicators show success but something feels wrong. When metrics improve and vitality declines. When the numbers are moving in the right direction and the system is losing something that the numbers cannot capture. When attention has been so fully captured by what is measured that what is unmeasured has become invisible.
The goal: To develop the capacity to recover peripheral vision when a framework has narrowed sight — to attend to the gorilla walking through the room while still counting the passes.
The foundation.
The Invisible Gorilla experiment demonstrated something more unsettling than the fact that people miss things. It demonstrated that people do not know they are missing them. The observers who failed to see the gorilla were not distracted or careless. They were doing exactly what they had been asked to do — counting passes — and doing it well. The focused attention that made them good at the task was the same attention that made them blind to the gorilla.
Measurement frameworks work the same way. They specify what matters. In doing so, they necessarily specify — though silently — what does not matter, what can be safely filtered, what falls outside the frame of relevance. The framework cannot announce its own exclusions. It can only focus attention on what it includes.
The primer’s guiding principle points toward the specific discipline this requires: observing the whole circle’s movement rather than interpreting the limitless interactions among parts. When attention is captured by metrics, the parts being measured become the system. The whole — which includes everything the metrics exclude — disappears. The practitioner sees the passes. The gorilla walks through unseen.
This protocol is distinct from the Gorilla Scan. The Gorilla Scan develops the capacity to notice when something is missing in the room during live engagement. This protocol develops the capacity to see what measurement frameworks structurally exclude — a different kind of blindness, operating at the level of how a system understands itself over time.
The moves.
1. Name what is being measured.
Before looking for what is excluded, become explicit about what is included. What does the framework track? What metrics define success? What indicators receive attention in reviews, reports, and decisions?
Name these specifically. The framework’s territory becomes visible as territory — bounded, partial, chosen — rather than as a neutral representation of reality.
What happens: The measurements lose their appearance of completeness and reveal themselves as selections. This is the prerequisite for seeing what was not selected. A framework that appears to capture everything cannot be questioned. A framework that is visible as a partial view can be.
2. Sit with the unmeasured.
Having named what is measured, dwell in the negative space. What could be true about the system that would never appear in the metrics? What aspects of the system’s functioning have no corresponding indicator? What would someone inside the system know that the dashboard would not show?
This is not a search for better metrics. It is a practice of attending to what exists outside the frame — not to add it to the frame, but to hold it in awareness alongside the frame.
What happens: The exclusions become present. Not as failures of the framework — every framework excludes — but as regions of the system that exist without attention. The negative space has shape. It begins to be perceptible rather than simply absent.
3. Attend to felt sense alongside the data.
Before analysing or interpreting, notice what arises somatically and relationally when engaging with this system. What is the felt quality of interactions? What do people’s energy, pace, and presence convey that their reports do not? What is present in the room that would never appear in a dashboard?
This is not mysticism. It is a different channel of information — one that measurement frameworks are structurally designed to exclude because it cannot be standardised.
What happens: A more complete picture of the system’s actual state becomes available. The felt sense and the metrics can now be held together — sometimes confirming each other, sometimes diverging in ways that are themselves informative.
4. Follow the peripheral signal.
Notice what appears at the edge of attention — the offhand comment, the thing mentioned and then dropped, the pattern that does not fit the framework’s categories, the question that gets redirected before it is answered. Rather than returning attention immediately to the measured centre, follow the peripheral signal briefly.
What happens: What the framework made invisible begins to become perceptible. Not through force of attention but through willingness to let attention be drawn by what the framework ignores. The gorilla becomes visible when the practitioner is willing to look away from the passes for a moment.
5. Hold both without resolving.
Having seen what the framework excludes, resist the pull to create a new, more complete framework. Hold the measured and the unmeasured simultaneously. Let both be present without forcing synthesis.
What happens: The system becomes larger than any framework. The practitioner’s perception includes both what measurement captures and what it cannot. The whole circle’s movement becomes available — not because the framework was replaced, but because it was held as partial rather than complete.
The internal calibration.
Before acting on what you have seen:
Am I seeing what is actually unmeasured or what I want to find?
Is my attention genuinely peripheral or have I simply shifted to a different centre?
Can I hold the unmeasured without immediately making it measured?
Where is my own discomfort with ambiguity pushing me toward premature framing?
The discipline.
The gorilla does not announce itself. It walks through while attention is elsewhere. The practitioner’s discipline is not to stop counting passes — the measured matters too — but to develop the peripheral vision that notices movement the count cannot capture. The framework serves until it blinds. The discipline is knowing when service has become blindness, and recovering sight without abandoning the framework entirely.
If this protocol is part of the practice you are building, the paid protocols go further — developing the capacity to work with what becomes visible once the framework’s limits have been seen.
🎧 Thank you for reading.
An Authentic Practice with Right Attention Protocol. © 2025 Victor Nuñez / LABKOM Co. Ltd. Thailand. All rights reserved.
Further Reading
Simons, Daniel J., and Christopher F. Chabris. “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events.” Perception, vol. 28, no. 9, 1999, pp. 1059–1074.
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.