A piece on organizational blind spots.

You know the game Where’s the Object? A card full of items is placed in front of the players, and everyone is told what to find. A key, for example. Everyone looks at the same image, searches, keeps searching, until someone shouts: “Got it!” One point. Next round.

Nothing particularly philosophical about that, at first glance.

And yet, the mechanics of this game strike me. The moment we’re told what to look for, our attention organizes itself around that specific search. The cup is still there, so is the dog, the umbrella hasn’t mysteriously vanished. But we’re looking for a key. Everything else becomes invisible.

We look at the whole card, but we’re not trying to see it. We’re trying to find something in it as fast as possible. We want to put our finger on it.

What if we did exactly the same thing when we try to understand a situation?

We decide based on what we see

A company notices rising employee turnover. It looks at salaries, managers, workload, what’s offered elsewhere. It gathers data, meets with teams, compares indicators, and eventually identifies an explanation plausible enough to act on.

It might even make an excellent decision.

Based on what it sees.

That’s the little detail that gets me.

We pay enormous attention to the quality of our decisions. Much less, perhaps, to the quality of the territory on which we’re making them.

A decision can be logical, documented, thoughtful, and perfectly consistent with all the information we have. But what happens if a decisive piece of information simply isn’t in what we thought to look at?

We could have excellent reasoning, an excellent solution, and excellent execution.

Of the wrong problem.

That would still be a shame.

Seeing something doesn’t mean understanding what causes it

In an article I wrote a while back, I used the analogy of a sick tree. We see its branches drying out, its leaves turning yellow, its fruit becoming scarcer. These signs tell us something is happening, but they don’t necessarily tell us why.

Maybe so. Or maybe a communication problem is produced by a structure, a drop in performance is the consequence of a decision made elsewhere, or high turnover gets blamed on employees when its actual conditions are quietly built up in the interactions between several parts of the organization.

Because there’s also what happens between things.

Between an employee and their manager. Between two teams. Between a decision and its consequences. Between what one department knows and what the other doesn’t. Two excellent departments can together produce a completely inefficient process. A decision that’s perfectly rational for one unit can become completely absurd when you look at the whole.

We look at the branch because it just turned yellow. Makes sense, it’s right in front of us. But before looking for how to fix it, maybe we should look at the soil. The question is no longer just whether what we see is true.

The question is what’s missing around it.

Are we working on an amputated territory?

Two questions keep coming back in my work:

What am I not seeing yet?

And:

What should I be looking at?

They look similar, but they don’t do quite the same job. The first opens up the territory. It accepts that an important piece of information, a relationship, a perspective, or a condition might currently be outside my field of view. The second directs the gaze. Among everything I could observe, what would actually be relevant to better understand what’s really happening in front of me?

This obviously isn’t about seeing everything. Good luck with that.

It’s more about avoiding, as much as possible, working on an amputated territory without even knowing it’s amputated.

Imagine someone handed you a map with part of it cut out. You could perfectly well study what’s left, measure distances, chart a route, and make a completely rational decision. You could be methodical, competent, and quite proud of your plan.

The reasoning might be flawless.

Except a road, an obstacle, or even a possible destination could simply be sitting in the missing piece.

That’s what concerns me.

Back to our turnover example. If I observe the employee, I’ll find certain information. If I shift my gaze to their manager, their team, the interactions between departments, the processes, past decisions, or the external environment, other information will appear. If I then look at the relationships between these elements rather than each one separately, the territory shifts again.

None of these viewpoints is automatically the right one. None is automatically wrong either. Each one lets us see certain things and, inevitably, leaves others somewhere behind.

But something interesting can happen when we recover a missing piece of territory: the problem itself can change.

“Why are our employees leaving?” could become: “What, in our current environment, keeps producing conditions that push them to leave?”

Same situation.

Yet we’re no longer looking for the same thing.

And if we’re no longer looking for the same thing, the possibilities change too.

How much does an amputated territory cost?

Here’s a line I’d love to see appear on a financial statement:

“Costs caused by what we didn’t think to look at.”

Too bad, it doesn’t exist.

It would be fascinating.

And yet, we do pay these costs. A technology implemented to fix a problem that wasn’t technological, training meant to correct a behavior produced elsewhere, extra hiring to compensate for a poor distribution of work, management hours spent again and again on the same tensions, or a program that dulls a symptom just enough to make it tolerable without ever changing what’s causing it.

And we also pay for what fits much less easily into a spreadsheet: accumulating fatigue, frustration, cynicism, disengagement, loss of trust. Managers feel like they’ve tried everything. Employees watch yet another initiative go by, meant to fix a problem they don’t even recognize in the way it’s presented to them.

Then another one.

And maybe another.

By constantly solving what we see without finding what produces what we see, we can even end up believing the problem is unsolvable.

When it might simply be sitting in the piece of the map we’ve never looked at.

More information. Really?

The answer seems almost obvious: let’s gather more information. Let’s add indicators, consult more people, analyze more data, and now use artificial intelligence to process it all.

Why not?

But more information doesn’t necessarily guarantee more visibility.

A hundred people can look in the same direction. Several analyses can start from the same premise. Several dashboards can measure different manifestations of the same phenomenon. We can even ask several artificial intelligences to answer a question without ever asking ourselves why we decided that was the question to ask in the first place.

We may have increased our analytical capacity, our speed, our precision, and our productivity.

Great.

But have we recovered the missing piece of the map?

Not necessarily.

And here’s probably the idea that bothers me most in all of this:

You can become extraordinarily efficient in the wrong direction.

We celebrate efficiency, and rightly so. We try to go faster, use our resources better, automate certain tasks, and reduce waste. But efficiency has a fairly brutal limitation: it doesn’t choose the destination.

It only lets us move more efficiently toward the one we’ve already chosen.

A wrong direction traveled slowly takes us away from our destination. A wrong direction traveled with remarkable efficiency simply takes us away from it much faster. Probably with beautiful indicators to confirm just how well we’re progressing.

Funny.

A little less so when the bill comes due.

We invest heavily to get better answers. We develop our tools, our processes, our skills, our systems, and now our artificial intelligences.

How much do we invest in checking whether we’re answering the right questions?

Our maps will always be incomplete

I’m not suggesting we question everything until no one dares make a decision anymore. That would be a strange way to improve things.

Nor do I believe it’s possible to get a perfectly complete picture of a situation. There will always be missing information, perspectives we can’t access, changes impossible to anticipate, and above all, things we won’t even know to look for.

Our maps will always be incomplete.

So the question isn’t about seeing everything.

The question might be whether what’s missing could change what we’re about to do.

Because there’s a considerable difference between working on an incomplete territory while knowing it’s incomplete, and working on an incomplete territory while believing it represents the whole territory.

In the first case, new information can still shift our understanding. A contradiction can have its place. Someone can show up with an annoying observation that doesn’t fit our nice explanation at all, and precisely for that reason, deserve to be heard.

In the second, we mostly just get better at answering the question we’ve already chosen to ask.

And we can become very, very good at that.

So, what do I see?

Let’s go back to our game.

The card is in front of us, full of objects, and someone announces: “Find the key.” Everyone searches until one person spots it and shouts: “Got it!”

In the game, they deserve their point. That’s exactly what they were asked to do.

In business, I sometimes wonder if the person who should get the point isn’t instead the one who keeps looking at the card a few seconds longer and eventually asks:

“Wait… why are we looking for a key?”

Because before a decision, there’s a formulated problem. Before that problem, there’s a territory we managed to perceive. That territory shapes the possibilities available to us, which in turn shape our decision, our actions, and ultimately our ability to adapt.

Observation → perceived territory → formulated problem → accessible possibilities → decision → action → adaptation.

We invest heavily in the steps on the right side of this chain. Solutions, tools, execution, performance, adaptation. Always better. Always faster.

I’m simply suggesting we go back, from time to time, all the way to the left.

To the very beginning.

Because if the territory is amputated from the start, at what point in this chain do we think we can recover what never entered it in the first place? So the next time something seems obvious to you, maybe look at the card a few seconds longer.

Not necessarily to find a better answer.

Maybe just to ask yourself:

What am I not seeing yet?

And above all:

What should I be looking at?

To explore what your business isn’t seeing yet, click here to book a call with Audrey.