The Cost of Focus

There are ideas so self-evident that no one thinks to question them. Focus is one of them. Concentrate on what matters. Eliminate the noise. Do one thing well. It sounds like wisdom that is difficult to argue with — which is precisely why it is rarely tested.

But focus has a side effect. Fundamental, and almost never discussed.

The Gorilla in the Room

In 1999, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment that became one of the most cited in cognitive science. Participants were shown a video of two teams passing a basketball. Their task was to count the passes made by one of the teams. At some point, a gorilla — a person in a costume — walked through the scene, stopped, beat its chest, and left.

Around half the participants did not notice it.

Not because they were inattentive. Because they were attentive — but to something else. Focus itself made the gorilla invisible.

Simons called this inattentional blindness. Not a metaphor. A description of how human perception actually works: what falls outside the focus is literally not processed. It exists — but not for the observer.

The Expertise Paradox

Now apply this to organisations.

A high-performing team is a collective focus, aimed in one direction with exceptional precision. The deeper the expertise, the sharper the aim. And the narrower the field of view.

The paradox: the better the organisation, the larger its blind spots.

This is not a weakness of underperforming companies. It is a structural property of any high-efficiency system. A technology company looks at technology. A financial firm looks at numbers. A manufacturer looks at processes. Each sees its own domain with rare depth — and precisely because of this, sees almost nothing of what lies alongside it.

Kahneman described the mechanism as early as 1973: attention is a limited resource. When it is fully directed inward, blindness forms on the outside. Not metaphorical blindness — literal. What does not enter the field of attention is not analysed, not evaluated, does not exist as an object of decision.

There is a second layer. Kahneman called it theory-induced blindness: when an organisation trusts its own model too completely — its view of the market, of competitors, of itself — it stops registering signals that contradict that model. Not because it ignores them deliberately. Because they fall out of processing entirely.

What Lives in the Blind Zone

Assets that exist but are not used. Connections that are present but not activated. Side effects of the core business that no one counts as value. Signals from the environment that do not fit the current model. Opportunities that never made it onto any agenda — not because they are absent, but because no one looked in that direction.

They do not disappear. They accumulate.

Bain's 2026 research surveyed over 1,100 senior executives across 18 industries. In 2025, 86% expected to hit their growth targets. 42% did not — up from 32% the year before.

Bain's conclusion: companies need to turn market signals into action faster. But before a signal can be acted on, it has to be noticed — isn't it?

In a world where signals change constantly, noticing cannot be occasional. It has to be a function.

The Intuitive Answer Is Wrong

When people hear about blind spots, the first response is predictable: broaden the focus. Look wider. Be more open.

This does not work.

You cannot ask a surgeon mid-operation to "look wider." Focus is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the condition of performance. Remove it and you lose what makes the organisation effective in the first place.

The right answer is paradoxical: what is needed is not a wider focus — but a separate function. Parallel, not instead. A deliberately designed capability to look where the primary focus, by definition, does not.

This is precisely how R&D works. No one tells engineers to stop and think about future products. A separate function is created — with a different task, a different horizon, a different angle of vision.

The Man on the Mast

Sailing ships carried a lookout at the top of the mast. Because the primary crew — focused on navigation, rigging, wind, and each other — could have missed what was coming from the horizon in time..

The lookout had no other routine task. No navigation, no rigging, no cargo. Only watching. In conditions where missing the horizon meant missing everything, dedicated observation proved its worth — not as a luxury, but as a function.

Businesses today might ask themselves the same question: is there anyone on the mast?

Source: Bain & Company, 2026 B2B Growth Agenda Report
https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2026/more-companies-missing-revenue-targets-amid-ai-and-geopolitical-volatility-bain--company-survey-finds/