What Are We Not Seeing, Yet?
Recently, I stood in front of a room full of digital leaders and asked them a question:
What are we not seeing, yet?
I had thought about the question a lot before presenting it to the room. But the more I have lived with it, the more interested I have become in its smallest word.
Yet.
Without it, what are we not seeing? Sounds like a search for a blind spot—something we have overlooked and should probably find.
Add yet, and the question opens.
It allows for the possibility that something is emerging which we do not understand yet. A weak signal. An uncomfortable question. A different interpretation. Something happening at the edges that does not yet look important enough to command our attention.
I have been wondering whether we are becoming less good at noticing those things.
Not because we know too little. Perhaps because we know so much.
The landscape I already knew
Recently, I took the train from Montreux to Spiez and treated myself to one of the « fancy » seats. I was enjoying the view and the peace when a group of American tourists arrived.
They were enthusiastic. Very enthusiastic. The lake was amazing. The vineyards were amazing. The mountains were, inevitably, amazing.
I confess that my first reaction was not curiosity. It was judgement.
I knew this landscape. I had travelled this route many times.
And then I caught myself.
They were seeing it. I was recognizing it.
So I tried something. For the rest of the journey, I decided to see what they were seeing - I shifted my perspective.
I looked properly at the vineyards falling towards the lake. At the changing light on the water. At the mountains appearing through the windows.
Nothing outside the train had changed. But my attention had. And the familiar became visible again. And it was amazing!
When knowing becomes not looking
We tend to think familiarity helps us see more. Often it does. Experience gives us context, patterns and the ability to notice things a newcomer might miss.
But familiarity can do something else too.
Once we know what something is, we become very good at recognizing it without really looking.
A landscape. A market. An organization. A person. A problem.
Even ourselves.
We see enough to confirm what we already know, and then we move on. This is efficient. We couldn’t function if we approached everything as though we had never encountered it before.
But efficiency has a cost. Sometimes we stop expecting to be surprised. And I wonder how much becomes invisible at exactly that moment.
When answers become easy
I have spent much of this month thinking about questions. Why do we stop asking why? What assumptions have our questions already made? What happens when we rush too quickly towards an answer?
These questions feel more important to me as answers become easier to obtain.
We can now give AI a question and receive something articulate, structured and plausible within seconds. That is extraordinary. I use it. I value it.
But easier answers make our ability to notice more important, not less.
Because even an excellent answer begins with what we thought to ask.
It cannot make us curious about something we have already dismissed as irrelevant. It cannot force us to look again at something we are certain we already understand.
Sometimes what we need is not another answer.
We need another look.
Before something becomes obvious
We tend to imagine that important things will look important when they arrive.
I am not sure they do.
Sometimes change first appears as something slightly inconvenient—a strange question in a meeting. A customer behaving differently. A colleague who keeps returning to something everyone else has moved past. An idea that doesn’t fit neatly into the strategy. A feeling that something which used to work no longer quite does.
These things are easy to dismiss because they haven't yet earned the right to seem important.
But nearly everything genuinely new spends some time looking unimportant.
I think this is true in our personal lives too.
We wait for clarity before taking our own quiet signals seriously. We expect what matters to arrive with certainty attached.
Usually it doesn’t. Sometimes it is simply the thought that keeps returning. The conversation you can’t quite forget. The possibility you keep talking yourself out of. The feeling that the landscape you know so well no longer looks quite the same.
Leave room for « yet »
This is why I keep coming back to that last word.
Yet doesn’t ask us to predict the future. It asks us to remain available to it.
It reminds us that what we currently see is not everything there is to see, and what we currently know is not the end of what we might understand.
That feels especially important now, when it has become so easy to make an idea look finished before we have allowed it to be unfinished. We can arrive at the polished answer before we have spent enough time at the messy whiteboard.
So I am trying to ask the question more often. In meetings, certainly. But also in my writing, my relationships and my own life.
What am I not seeing, yet?
And then I am trying to do something that may be harder.
Wait. Look again. Stay curious a little longer.
Because perhaps the future doesn’t always arrive somewhere over the horizon. Sometimes it is just outside the window.
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