I was worried. I couldn’t find my son and his grandfather who were supposed to be fishing together. I looked out behind my father-in-law’s house at the boat dock where they should have been standing to fish in the lake. And they weren’t there. I knew they weren’t out on the lake because the fishing boat was slung up in the boat house. Despite looking everywhere I thought they would be, I still couldn’t find them. So, perplexed, I waited in the house for them to show up, trusting that my son was in good hands.
An hour later, they walked in and I immediately jumped up and demanded to know where they had been. “We we’re out fishing on the lake,” my son said with a puzzled expression on his face. I explained that they couldn’t have been because the boat was docked in the slip. My son laughed and said “Dad, take another look,” and pointed to the boat house. I did, and there were… TWO boats! My father-in-law’s fishing boat was tied up at the dock looking just like I remembered it—small, green hulled, simple, rigged for fishing. And there, moored in the slip, was a ski boat—a big, white, designed-for-speed rigged-for-skiing boat-that-looked-nothing-like-a-fishing-boat boat sat there as clear as day. And despite looking right at it all morning, I had not seen it. I had not expected it to be there, and to me, it wasn’t.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust
This story illustrates the power that our expectations have to distort our perception and literally show us what we expect to see rather than what is really there. It is this perceptual bias that is a main reason that businesses do not see competitive threats until it is too late. It is why leaders look at the numbers and see evidence that defending the old Success Formula is working… right up to the day that everything crashes down around them. It is why customer-facing employees often have a dramatically different—and mostly more accurate—understanding of the competitive realities than senior executives.
In order to create the breakthroughs that they desire, executives must first disrupt their mental lock-in. This is the only way to open up their perceptual bias to see new information and reach new understandings. Only in seeing the situation “with new eyes” are rich new possibilities opened up for truly novel innovation.
