The Strategy Blindness Problem: Training Your Senses for What Counts

Among the great challenges of compexity and disruption is knowing what to look at and how to make sense of what you see. Without training your senses, you may be going in blind.

The idea of seeing things might be natural, but it still requires work. Many natural things require our effort, which is why there are classes, coaches, and clinicians that deal with issues such as breathing, relationships, and sleep. We might expect leaders, armed with data and experience to be able to see patterns and pathways among the signals to make wise, strategic choices. But such assumptions are predicated on a level of preparedness that many leaders — and their organizations — lack.

The reasons have much to do with an education and organizational reward system that has emphasized linear, normative scientific approaches to strategy and leadership. This is the realm of key performance measures, SMART goals, and command and control structures. This is the home of the powerful leader and the strategic plan and is at the core of scientific management and production system found in industrial manufacturing.

If we are to navigate through complexity and the uncertainty it brings, we need to get in touch with something else and that requires using our senses.

Somatic Intelligence in Strategy

I’d like to invite some creative thinking about the role of sensing in strategy, by drawing first on some lessons from nature and parallels with things we already know and do.

Our bodies constantly process environmental signals below conscious awareness—shifts in tension, rhythm, temperature, and spatial dynamics. Strategic designers might cultivate a similar peripheral awareness of organizational and market signals.

Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks—the off-note in music, the micro-expression that reveals emotion, and the changed quality of light before a weather shift. Strategic sensing operates similarly, identifying weak signals before they become trends. Consider how master craftspeople develop tacit knowledge through repetitive sensory engagement with their materials.

What would it mean to develop equivalent intimacy with the “materials” of organizational strategy? How can we draw on what we’ve learned from biology, craftsmanship, and psychology to attune ourselves to the systems around us using our senses.

And by senses, I mean the full gamut of physiological, but also psychological and social senses that we have that enable us to spot patterns and act.

Strong Use of Weak Signals

Weak signals themselves are not clear-cut; as said before, generally they consist of information of imperfect quality. Weak signals are deemed weak not for lack of importance but because they are easily obfuscated by other factors, such as “white noise” of internal or external origin. (Mendonça, Cardoso, and Caraça, 2012)

Seeing what’s in front of us and just ahead of us is difficult, especially when there is a lot going on. However, we can spot clues about what might be happening. In the paper by Mendonça, Cardoso, and Caraça, 2012 the authors call these early clues “weak signals” – basically incomplete bits of information that might seem weird or unimportant at first, but could actually be pointing to major changes coming down the road. Think of them like the first few drops of rain that warn you a storm is approaching (or maybe the wind changing at the same time). The problem is that people and organizations are really bad at paying attention to these early warnings, often dismissing them because they don’t fit with what they already believe or expect to happen. The authors use the famous example of Easter Island, where it was believed that the people ignored clear signs that they were running out of trees (their main resource) and ended up causing their own civilization to collapse.

What makes this case so interesting and sligtly ironic, is that the evidence for Easter Island’s collapse was later refuted for the reasons that scientists mis-interpreted what was, at the time, weak signals for an alternative explanation. The example demonstrates how we can see, fail to see, and misinterpret what we see all in one.

Nevertheless, the conclusions around what contributes to seeing and sensing weak signals still holds true. The authors argue that to get better at spotting and acting on these weak signals, organizations need to create systems where different people can share unusual observations, where weird ideas are taken seriously rather than dismissed, and where decision-makers are willing to consider information that challenges their assumptions. The goal is to avoid being blindsided by changes that, looking back, had warning signs that everyone missed or ignored.

So how, like the sailors above, do we sense where to go?

Developing Your Weak Signal Detection Skills

Sharpen Your Observation Habits

Start by actively looking for things that don’t quite fit the normal pattern. Train yourself to notice when experts disagree strongly about something, when a new trend appears much earlier than expected, or when everyday people consistently disagree with expert predictions. Pay attention to outliers – those odd data points or unusual events that most people dismiss as anomalies. Create a simple habit of asking “What’s different today?” or “What surprised me this week?” Keep a running list of these observations, even if they seem unimportant at the time.

Expanding Your Information Diet and Networks 

Break out of your usual information bubble by deliberately seeking diverse perspectives and sources. As I often suggest: we need to get out more. Read outside your field, talk to people from different backgrounds, and pay attention to what’s happening at the edges – in different geographic regions, age groups, or industries. Look for stories that mainstream sources aren’t covering yet, or pay attention to what people are complaining about in online forums and social media. The key is to cast a wide net and resist the urge to only consume information that confirms what you already think.

Practice Connecting the Dots

 Weak signals become powerful when you can link seemingly unrelated pieces of information together. Regularly step back and ask yourself: “What patterns am I seeing across different areas?” “How might this small change in one field affect something completely different?” Create time for reflection – perhaps a weekly review where you look at your collected observations and try to spot themes or connections. Don’t worry about being wrong; the goal is to develop your pattern-recognition muscles and get comfortable with uncertainty while making decisions based on incomplete information.

Make Sense Socially

Getting out (see earlier point) and seeing people, speaking with them, sharing insights, and experiencing things in shared way builds the intimacy and trust needed to be confident in asserting claims, developing hypotheses about what you see, and feeling comfortable with the unknown. Weak signals analysis is not foolproof. However, by building up the capacity to have conversations and gather data about the emerging patterns we see around us and socializing that knowledge, we can better make sense of complexity.

Training Ourselves

Creative practice (not to be confused with creativity) is a skill and, much like a muscle, gets better with use. We all have the means for creativity, although many of us have lost it. Getting it back, requires time, care, and attention. Strategy is a place where we can bring our creative skills to bear on what we see. Strategic design is about channeling what we have with what we see (and seek) and putting it together into a workable adaptive plan.

As we train ourselves, we reconnect with our sensory capacity. Individual and organizational mindfulness practices can help build up the mental acuity and physiological sensitivity that allow us to feel, see, and sense things. Building an organizational culture and practice space to intentionally learn is another. Use of developmental evaluation and strategic learning plans can make a considerable difference.

In our future posts in this series, we’ll explore this in more detail as we explore strategic design and navigating complexity.

Thanks for reading.

Need help building up your creative practice and creating strategic plans and processes that require attention to complexity? Let’s chat.