TL;DR: The biggest threat to any organisation is rarely missing information. It's missing the lens to receive it. Kodak and Nokia both had the future in their hands. They just had no word for what they were holding.
“What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.” — Thomas Kuhn
In the nineteenth century, William Gladstone, then better known as a classics scholar than a Prime Minister, was reading Homer and noticed something unusual. In the Odyssey, the sea is described as “wine-dark.” Sheep are called violet. The sky is almost never given a colour at all. And blue, the colour most associated with the Mediterranean world, appears nowhere. Not even once.
Gladstone concluded the ancient Greeks may have been partially colour blind. Today, we know that was wrong. The better explanation is simpler. They had no word for blue.
Research on the Himba people of Namibia, who also lack a term for blue, shows how deep this runs. When shown a circle of green squares with one blue square hidden among them, they struggle to identify the odd one out, even though the difference is obvious to most English speakers. Yet show them a circle of green squares with one subtly different shade of green, a distinction most of us cannot even detect, and they spot it immediately.
The light reaches the eye. The signal is there. But without a category, it fades into the background.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
The same is true of the system doing the seeing. The human retina contains three types of cone cells, tuned to red, green and blue. Our distant ancestors had more, but when they retreated into the dark, colour mattered less than survival and much of that range was lost. Primates later clawed some of it back.
The system we rely on to interpret reality is a reduced version of something richer that once existed. We tend to assume what we see is what is there. But a lot of what is there never quite registers.
Inside organisations, the same pattern appears.
Opportunities and threats sit in plain sight. Without a way to recognise them, leaders fail to register anything new. What doesn’t fit the existing model is bent back into it, or ignored.
When we look back, it often seems obvious.
At the time, it didn’t.
The signals were there. Inside the building. In reports by those who had the lenses, in shifting behaviours of customers and markets, in early versions of what was coming next.
People saw them.
They just didn’t recognise what they were looking at.
Kodak and Nokia are tragic examples of this (amongst many other reasons for their respective declines).
A Limited Lens
In 2001, Kodak bought Ofoto, one of the earliest digitally-native photo-sharing platforms. This was the kind of asset that would, a decade later, make Facebook pay a billion dollars for Instagram. Kodak had the technology, the audience, and the infrastructure. But they did what most incumbents do and they optimized the existing paradigm. They used Ofoto to sell more prints.
Every shared digital photo, in their model, was a prompt to turn it physical. A platform opportunity funnelled back into the old business model. Innovation scholars call this cramming, to force a new shape into an old mould. Kodak could not see (and did not want to) itself as a platform company, because Kodak was a film company. Everything, including the future, was seen through the lens of film. (Excuse the pun.)
“We saw it as a tool to sell our phones ’cause that’s where we got our money.” - Timo M. Partanen, Former Head of Market Intelligence, Nokia
At its peak, Nokia was the most valuable company in Europe. Its App Store existed before Apple’s. And buried inside its product portfolio was something nobody quite had a name for yet.
Comes With Music was a Nokia service that did something remarkable for its time. Buy a Nokia phone, get a year of free music (not streamed, but downloaded). Every track from the Nokia Music Store, yours for twelve months. Timo M. Partanen, Nokia’s former head of market intelligence, described it to me directly: “You can think about that as Spotify, some twenty years ago.”
They had it. The concept, the library, the subscriber relationship. What they didn’t have was the ability to see it as anything other than a phone feature! As Timo put it, Nokia never considered “that this could be potentially a Spotify-type service that would be independent.” The operators didn’t want them going that way. The resources weren’t there. The capabilities weren’t fully there either. But underneath all of that, something more fundamental: “Nokia didn’t think beyond these devices. We saw it as a tool to sell our phones, ‘cause that’s where we got our money.”
The portal was inside the product the whole time. Nokia just never had a word for it!
What Are You (Not) Seeing?
Clayton Christensen spent his career on this problem. His answer was counterintuitive. Stop teaching leaders what to think. Teach them how to think. Give them better lenses.
He used to say: “I don’t have an opinion. The theory has an opinion.”
When Andy Grove asked him what disruption meant for Intel, Christensen refused to give a conclusion. He explained the theory instead. Grove grasped it, and Intel changed direction. The lens shifted.and thus the questions changed. And different questions lead somewhere entirely new.
Because the lens doesn’t just shape what you see. It shapes what you can ask. Nokia never asked how to build the world’s most powerful software platform. It only asked how to protect its position in handsets. Kodak never asked how to own digital photography. It only asked how to use digital photography to sell more prints.
You cannot ask a question you have no words for.
Neither Kodak nor Nokia were short of intelligence, data, or talented people. What they were short of was a lens that could make the signal mean something different from what it had always meant.
Homer’s sea was wine-dark because he had no word for blue. It was there the whole time. Vast. Undeniable. Invisible.
The question is rarely whether you’re looking through a lens right now. You are. We all are.
In this age of ai, the question is what’s the wine-dark sea in your business? And do you have a word for it yet?
This week’s Thursday Thought is about the lenses we look through — and what we miss because of them.
The timing is deliberate.
This week on The Innovation Show, I’m joined by Jeff DeGraff and Staney DeGraff, co-authors of The Innovation Code. It is a book built on a deceptively simple premise: that real innovation doesn’t come from harmony, but from constructive conflict between people who see the world completely differently.
The DeGraffs introduce four archetypes — the artist, the engineer, the athlete, and the sage — each carrying a distinct worldview, a distinct set of strengths, and a distinct blind spot. As I said to Jeff during our conversation, the artist’s lens is totally different. They see things the engineer genuinely cannot see. And vice versa. That’s not a problem to be managed. It’s the engine.
Schumpeter put it this way, and Jeff returns to it throughout the book: organisations aren’t destroyed by competitors, but because they can’t change their dominant worldview. Sound familiar?
If this Thursday Thought is about the danger of seeing through only one lens, this episode is about what happens when you deliberately bring other lenses into the room.
You can be in the hat to win a copy of the DeGraffs’ book The Creative Mindset just by signing up to our Substack.
And if you want to go deeper on Nokia specifically — the hardware lens, the App Store, the music service that should have been Spotify — my conversation with Timo Partanen, former head of market intelligence at Nokia, is one of the most honest accounts I’ve heard of what it looks like from the inside when an organisation cannot see past what it has always been.