Why Smart Leaders Miss What’s Right in Front of Them
The most dangerous problems in an organization aren’t always hidden. Sometimes you’ve just been looking at them so long you stopped seeing them.
By Jake Ferrell
I went to the eye doctor because road signs were getting a little fuzzy. Nothing dramatic. I could still see, and my vision was around 20/25. Good enough to function. Good enough that I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it if the change hadn’t started becoming noticeable.
Then the doctor found something in my right eye. A splinter. Not metaphorically. An actual 3-millimeter splinter lodged in my cornea. And apparently it had been there for something like 30 years. Thirty years.
I had walked around with a foreign object in my eye for most of my life and had absolutely no idea it was there. That still blows my mind, because you’d think a splinter in your eye would be obvious. Apparently not.
My eye had adapted. My vision had adjusted. Somewhere along the way, diminished sight had simply become the way I saw. It had become normal.
And that’s the thing about normal: What becomes normal to us eventually becomes invisible to us.
That’s true of eyesight. It’s also true of organizations.
You can get used to almost anything
Organizations rarely wake up one morning completely dysfunctional. It happens slowly.
A workaround gets created because the real process is too cumbersome, then everyone starts using the workaround. Six months later, the workaround is the process.
A meeting stops being useful, but it stays on the calendar. A person becomes the bottleneck for every decision, but everyone has learned to work around it. A message gets more complicated over time because everybody keeps adding one more thing that “has to be in there.” A strategic priority may still be on the slide deck even though the budget, calendar and staffing stopped supporting it a year ago.
Nobody necessarily made a terrible decision. You just adapted. And eventually, you stop noticing. That’s a blindspot.
What is an organizational blindspot?
An organizational blindspot is a gap between what you think is happening and what is actually happening.
You think the priority is clear, but your team has four different definitions of it. You think you have a marketing problem, but you may actually have a message problem. You think you need more leads, but you may have plenty of leads and a follow-up problem.
You think execution is slow because people are busy. The real problem may be that nobody knows who owns the outcome.
You think growth has stalled because the market changed. Maybe. Or maybe you’re spending most of your time and money on activity that never drove growth in the first place.
That’s why blindspots are hard. The problem often isn’t that there’s no evidence. The evidence may be everywhere. You’ve just gotten used to looking at it.
Smart people are not immune
This is where leadership gets interesting. We tend to think experience should make us less susceptible to blindspots. Sometimes it does. But experience can also make us incredibly good at explaining why something is the way it is.
We know the history. We remember why that department was created. We know why that person owns that responsibility.
We remember the problem that led to that policy. We know why the website says what it says. We’ve heard the strategy a hundred times.
That context is valuable. But it can also keep us from asking one very simple question: Does this still make sense?
There’s a huge difference between understanding why something exists and knowing whether it should still exist. The longer you live inside a system, the harder that distinction can become.
Familiarity feels a lot like clarity
This happens with communication all the time. Leadership spends six months discussing a new strategy. You’ve heard the language dozens of times. You know exactly what it means. Then you announce it to the organization and everyone looks confused.
So you think, “We were incredibly clear.” Maybe you were. Or maybe you were incredibly familiar. Those aren’t the same thing.
The same thing happens with customers, donors, employees and volunteers. We assume people understand our message because we understand our message. We assume people know what the priority is because we’ve been talking about the priority. We assume everyone understands why something matters because we’ve lived with the reasoning for months.
Familiarity creates confidence. Sometimes undeserved confidence.
The clue is usually repetition
Here’s one of the easiest ways to start finding a blindspot: Look for something you keep having to solve.
The project that always stalls. The same disagreement every leadership meeting. The initiative everyone agrees is important but never quite gets done.
The customer question you answer over and over. The department that is perpetually overwhelmed. The marketing effort that generates activity but never seems to produce results. The priority that is somehow always urgent and somehow never finished.
Repetition is information. If you keep solving the same problem, there’s a decent chance you aren’t solving the real problem. You’re treating the symptom.
This is why an outside perspective can matter
An outsider doesn’t automatically know your organization better than you do. They shouldn’t. You know the people, the history, the mission, the customers, and the constraints.
But an outsider has one advantage: They haven’t adapted to your splinter.
They don’t know that everybody stopped questioning that process three years ago. They don’t know that “we’ve always done it this way.” They don’t know which assumptions have quietly become facts.
So they can ask questions that might sound almost annoyingly simple. Why does that person own this? Why is that a priority? Why isn’t it in the budget? Why does it take six approvals?
Why do you call that growth? Why do customers have to figure this out? Why are you still solving this?
Sometimes you don’t need someone with a magical answer. You need someone who is willing to question what everybody else has learned not to notice.
Start here
- If you want to look for blindspots in your own organization, start with a few questions.
What have we gotten used to that we probably shouldn’t have gotten used to?
What problem keeps coming back?
Where are we working harder without seeing better results?
What do we say is important that our budget, calendar or ownership doesn’t reinforce?
What feels obvious to leadership that may not be obvious to everyone else?
And maybe the biggest one:
What if the problem we think we have isn’t actually the problem?
That’s usually where the interesting work starts.
You can’t change what you can’t see
When that splinter came out of my eye, the crazy part wasn’t learning that something had been there. It was realizing how long I had been seeing through it. I had adjusted to the obstruction. It had become part of normal.
Organizations do that too. We adapt to broken processes, unclear priorities, bad assumptions, weak messaging, stalled execution and missed opportunities. Over time, we accommodate them.
Until somebody sees them. And once you see the gap, you can finally do something about it.
That’s the work behind BlindSpot.
We look at five places organizations commonly stop seeing clearly: Alignment, Clarity, Message, Growth and Execution.
You probably already have a sense that something isn’t quite right.
The question is whether the thing you’re seeing is the problem — or just the symptom.