Perceptual Shift and Business Model Innovation
Denis Oakley FRSA
Transforming Engineers into Entrepreneurs with mentor-led accelerators
Some people look at a wall and see a wall. Other people look at the wall and see something totally different. A frame for a Banksy mural for example. Seeing things differently like this is a step into wonder, and that is often the start of innovation and lots of other delicious things. The post is about perceptual shift and why its important to business model innovation
We’re not all Banksy though. What’s really interesting is why does someone who has always looked at a wall and seen a wall, change. Change and start to see something different.
A good friend of mine, the structural consultant Kira Higgs introduced me to a Swedish artist Hilma Klint through a show called Beyond the Visible
My passion isn’t art or art history. What I saw there was striking.
Hilma AF Klint and Beyond the Visible
This woman in the 1890s was painting pretty boring stuff. It was the sort of thing that my Great Grandmother was painting a couple of decades later. Nice pastoral scenes that would fit nicely on anybody’s wall
Then something changed. Hilma started to see the world differently. She had a perceptual shift Her painting style changed to reflect this.
This was the first abstract modernist painting in the western canon. Hilma had no one to copy. No one to inspire her. She was highly spiritual and apparently decided to paint what she ‘saw.’ It was so different that she refused to allow anyone to see it until 20 years after her death.
Today modernism is everywhere and her work doesn’t seem that startling or original any longer. That’s not the point. We are not here to be art critics or historians.
Using Perceptual Shift to Create New Business Models
What I want you to do is to look at the first painting and imagine that you painted it. Then try and imagine how you got to the point where you painted the second. How is your perception of the world changed? What have you let go of? What have you found?
This is what I call perceptual shift. The perceptual shift is the experience of the creator to shift from seeing reality in one way to see it in another way.
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What is this doing in a business strategy blog?
Most of the time most businessmen and entrepreneurs are busy painting pictures of cows. The world is drowning in pictures of cows. It’s incredibly tough to sell pictures of cows there are so many of them. Every so often someone sees something different, and then Bezos, Branson, Jobs et al are selling highly-priced unique artwork.
Perceptual shift is a key part of what seems to happen in a lot of business model innovations. This is important for two reasons.
Firstly business people are all taught the same things, so they tend to see the world in the same way. That means that two similar companies with similar staff will tend to come up with similar plans. This shared worldview leads to an inability to stand out, and you get trapped in competition.
If you see the world the same way that your competitor does how can you do anything differently?
Secondly, in a lot of cases, it’s the perceptual shift that creates the secret sauce that takes a boring or a stupid idea and makes it great. Sell advertising to small businesses? Not worth the time or effort Sir Martin Sorrel would probably have said in 1990. Now his business WPP is worth $20 billion, and Google is worth $2 trillion.
What is perceptual shift?
It’s the ability, or accident, that allows you to see the world in a different way, and in business, to create disruptive business models as a result
How do I do perceptual shift?
This is the first in a series of posts on perceptual shift and how to create it in your entrepreneurial journey. Right now my hypothesis is that you look for lots of patterns in the industry and then let your subconscious mind work on the patterns to create new ones.
What’s the benefit of perceptual shift?
If you can see an opportunity (that exists) that others can’t then you can use it to create new business models Larry Page $2 trillion vs Sir Martin Sorrell $20 billion. We aren’t just talking about products or services here – we’re seeing industry landscapes in entirely new ways.