Developed your Business’s Vision of late?
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
January 30th, 2007
You may already be aware of it but for me this is a new discovery. Thanks to George Day, I have found myself fascinated by your and my eyes’ vision as a metaphor for how we lead organisations. Day is the author of Peripheral Vision: Seven Steps to Seeing Business Opportunities Sooner.
According to Day
:
About 95% of all the sensors in our eyes are devoted to peripheral vision (the so-called ‘rod cells’), while the remaining five per cent (‘cone cells’) are used in focal vision. The rod cells allow us to detect motion, colour, and of course, the periphery. The two things that struck my co-author and I about this were that, on one hand, most organisations flip that ratio, so that most of their sensing resources are devoted to focal vision: they focus on current markets, products, and competitors, and very little is devoted to the periphery .
The second thing to which Day refers is the fact that it is possible to improve periphery vision – and general vision for that matter. For an organisational leader there is the ever-present responsibility to find ways of effectively improving one’s capacity for periphery vision alongside focal vision. To ask which of the two types of vision is more important might be akin to trying to determine which wing of an aeroplane is more important. I suppose if you want to stay in the air, both wings are equally crucial.
Tags: opportunities, peripheral vision
