‘You can see the future best through peripheral vision’.
Nicholas Negroponte.
In this podcast episode, I invited Kasun, a senior finance manager in the oil and gas industry to share with us the concept of ‘Peripheral Vision’ the need to detect market trends and weak signals beyond an organisation's line of sight.
By taking a birds eye view of the macro environment we are able to see beyond our normal boundaries.
The results of a survey conducted by the Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence found that a whopping 97% of business executives said that their companies lacked an early warning system, this serves to highlight the need for a peripheral company vision.
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Peripheral vision also highlights the need for an improvement in the approach to risk mitigation strategies.
By actively scanning the periphery, the organisation is able to identify early triggers and weak signals which the competition missed and act proactively to gain a first mover advantage.
However, managers must also be careful not to fall prey to confirmation bias and unconsciously filter information to support the current strategy being pursued.
According to Kasun, the problem with weak signals is that it often comes across as noise and is therefore ignored to focus on better or more immediate operational needs
The other issue with looking at the periphery is information overload. The massive lakes of data which are available to a manager means that selecting the relevant data and generating insight can seem like a Herculean task.
So what business decision makers of today need is a helicopter factor, or the ability to rise above the immediate situation and identify weak signals from emerging trends in the macro environment Or what some people may call seeing round the corner or giving attention to what is on the edges of our core vision
By developing a helicopter (birds eye view) factor in the boardroom, organisations can ensure that they avoid the business equivalent of tunnel vision.
Mattel, Blackberry, Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster and Yahoo are all examples of companies that fell prey to tunnel vision and lost their competitive advantage simply because they weren't focusing on the changing periphery of the competitive ecosystem that surrounded them.
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