Blind Spots, Ostriches, and Elephants: Confronting Lack of Awareness in Business

We’ve all heard about the importance of self-awareness—the ability to be conscious of our thoughts, emotions, and actions. Self-awareness is essential for personal growth, as it helps us reflect on our strengths and weaknesses, guiding us to adjust our behaviors for better outcomes.

But awareness goes beyond just understanding ourselves. It’s also about paying attention to what’s happening around us—recognizing patterns and changes in our environment to navigate life more effectively.

In business, awareness becomes more complex. It’s not just about individual awareness, but more importantly, it’s about collective awareness—where team members and decision-makers share a common understanding of both internal and external dynamics affecting the business. This goes beyond merely sharing information or technical knowledge; it requires the willingness to see beyond the obvious.

In my previous article on "The Habit of Strategy," I introduced the four key elements that make strategy a habit: Awareness, Alignment, Determination, and Discipline. Without awareness as the foundation, the rest of these elements falter, leading to misalignment or ineffective decision-making.

In this article, I’ll explore the three major sources of lack of awareness I’ve encountered in my consulting work and discuss how companies can overcome them.

The Blind Spot

A blind spot occurs when an organization is unaware of important aspects of its operations or environment. It’s not that people are intentionally ignoring information—they simply don’t know what they’re missing.

Blind spots typically arise from one of four sources:

1. Overwhelm from immediate demands: When teams are constantly focused on urgent tasks, they don’t have the time or bandwidth to step back, ask questions, and evaluate the bigger picture—or to investigate deeper issues that are harder to see without deliberate effort. When the focus is purely on what needs to be done now, critical signals—both threats and chances for innovation—can go unnoticed.
2. The trap of the turning wheel: Inertia of established routines and long-standing ways of thinking makes it difficult for teams to step outside their usual frames of reference. Familiar patterns prevent them from identifying new risks or opportunities, even when their environment changes.
3. Insufficient resources and capabilities: Organizations may lack the tools and systems needed to gather meaningful data, the analytical frameworks to turn that data into useful information, or the organizational capabilities to transform information into collective knowledge. Without these resources and capabilities, uncovering new insights becomes difficult.
4. The arrogance of ignorance: Sometimes leadership and teams can become overconfident in what they already know—risks, opportunities, and everything in between. This false sense of certainty stifles the need to open up conversations, preventing new information or alternative perspectives from surfacing and leaving blind spots unaddressed.

The danger of blind spots is that they can quietly erode value or create vulnerabilities that go unnoticed until it’s too late. Recognizing that blind spots exist—and that there’s always more to see—is the first step toward overcoming them.

The Ostrich Effect

The Ostrich Effect occurs when individuals within an organization are aware of a problem but actively choose to ignore it, for various reasons. By overlooking these issues, individuals hope the problem will disappear on its own, but this rarely happens.

There are several common drivers of the ostrich effect:

1. Fear of bad news: No one enjoys hearing bad news, especially when it challenges long-standing assumptions or decisions. Individuals may avoid confronting the truth to maintain a sense of internal comfort. However, ignoring the issue often makes it worse in the long run.
2. Complacency: When companies become too comfortable with past success, leaders and individuals may assume that what worked before will continue to work in the future. This leads to a reluctance to address emerging challenges, believing that there’s no need to change. This form of avoidance allows problems to grow and opportunities to be missed as individuals overlook the evolving circumstances around them.
3. Confirmation bias: Individuals often seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore evidence that contradicts them. This bias can prevent companies from acknowledging problems or considering alternative solutions.

While ignoring problems may seem like a temporary solution, the longer these issues are avoided, the more entrenched and damaging they become.

The Elephant in the Room

The Elephant in the Room refers to a problem or issue that everyone in the organization is aware of, but no one is willing to address. Though the issue is clear to everyone, it remains unspoken and unresolved, leading to inefficiencies and compromised decision-making.

There are several reasons why the elephant remains in the room:

1. Fear of conflict: Addressing the elephant often means opening up uncomfortable conversations and potentially creating tension among colleagues. Teams may avoid confronting the issue to maintain harmony, even when that harmony is superficial and allows problems to linger without resolution.
2. Groupthink and social conformity: Groupthink and conformity suppress open discussion, as individuals hesitate to voice concerns out of fear of disrupting the group’s cohesion. This reinforces the presence of the elephant, as no one dares to break the unspoken agreement to avoid the issue.
3. Power dynamics and hierarchy: The elephant thrives in environments where certain individuals or groups hold significant power. The rest may fear the consequences of challenging authority, leading to silence. In some cases, those best positioned to raise the issue don’t feel empowered to do so, leaving the elephant unaddressed and the organization stuck in its problematic status quo.

The Elephant in the Room is dangerous because it represents a collective denial of reality. When critical issues are left unaddressed, it weakens the organization’s ability to make effective decisions and resolve challenges. The longer it persists, the greater the damage to the organization’s culture and performance.

How to Overcome Lack of Awareness in Business

Overcoming a lack of awareness in business is not about finding quick fixes—it requires a deliberate and structured approach. This practice has three key components that leaders must focus on to foster and maintain collective awareness across the organization:

1. Internal Mindsets and Behaviors

Overcoming lack of awareness begins with leadership. Leaders set the tone for the organization by modeling the mindsets and behaviors expected from others, even when it’s uncomfortable. This mindset is the foundation for building a culture where awareness is seen as a shared responsibility.

• Ask more, tell less: The routine of systematically asking questions is crucial for uncovering new insights. Leaders should focus less on giving directives and more on posing thoughtful questions that challenge assumptions, reveal blind spots, and help teams explore beyond the obvious.
• Lead discussions! don’t just preside over meetings: Rather than overseeing—or worse, dominating—meetings, leaders should focus on facilitating discussions that encourage debate and the exploration of diverse viewpoints. This involves asking questions and listening attentively to foster deeper engagement and bring hidden issues to the surface.
• Set the example: Leaders should embody openness, transparency, inquiry, and critical thinking in their daily actions. By actively challenging their own assumptions and welcoming diverse perspectives, they encourage others to do the same, creating a ripple effect throughout the organization.

2. Formal Mechanisms and Resources

Collective awareness can’t be left to chance—it requires companies to implement systems and allocate resources that ensure critical insights are gathered, shared, and discussed regularly.

• Allocate resources for information gathering and sharing: Ensure the organization is equipped with the necessary resources like data collection tools, knowledge-sharing platforms, and any technologies that facilitate transparency.
• Implement periodic meetings: Hold regular strategic meetings, structured conversations, or daily check-ins that encourage teams to share information, uncover new insights, and address potential blind spots.
• Invite external perspectives: Encourage fresh thinking and new insights by bringing in external perspectives through consultants, guest speakers, or participation in expert forums. External voices can challenge internal assumptions and help uncover unseen opportunities or risks.

3. Building Internal Capabilities

While having the right tools and systems is important, true awareness comes from the capabilities of the people using them. Developing internal skills and fostering a culture of continuous learning ensures that teams can effectively generate, interpret, and act on insights.

• Invest in continuous learning: Ongoing training programs ensure that employees can stay ahead of evolving trends, new technologies, and industry shifts, by fostering expertise in data interpretation, strategic thinking, and critical analysis.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration: Encourage collaboration across departments to ensure a holistic view of the organization that leads to a more complete understanding of both internal dynamics and external opportunities.
• Make awareness part of performance expectations: Embed awareness practices into the organization's performance evaluation metrics, to assess not just immediate results but also how well employees engage in information gathering, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving. Making awareness part of performance reviews ensures that it remains a priority across all levels of the company.

Awareness as an Ongoing Practice

Awareness in business is not a one-time achievement—it’s a continuous practice. Whether it’s addressing blind spots, refusing to engage in the ostrich effect, or confronting the elephant in the room, leaders must remain vigilant and proactive in cultivating awareness. By promoting curiosity, encouraging open dialogue, setting time for reflection, embracing discomfort, and using the right tools, businesses can build the kind of awareness that leads to better decision-making, stronger alignment, and long-term success.

Ultimately, awareness is about seeing things as they truly are, not as we wish them to be. Companies that commit to this practice are far more likely to navigate complexity with clarity, agility, and confidence.

Is your company as aware as it needs to be?

Good Luck!

Ximena Jimenez

Founder - Managing Director LITup

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