Blind by Default →
Sebastian Bensusan, writing about how digital work is invisible by default:
Imagine you work at a paper store:
- One day, you observe there are a lot more customers in the store, mostly Chinese, and they are all buying red paper. Some of them ask for red envelopes, which you don’t have.
- Eventually you ask them, what are the envelopes for? “Honboa?! Chinese New Year gifts of course!”. Trying to orient yourself, you read the Wikipedia page and it all clicks together.
- You decide that you should be ready for the next Chinese New Year.
- You act by ordering the envelopes which 10x sales. Success!
This wasn’t a tough mystery to solve… if you work at the store.
Yet if you work at an e-commerce store selling the exact same items, it’s almost impossible to get this depth of information at comparable speed:
By default you know nothing, not even if you had sales that day. To know that, you have to:
- Decide that you want to know the daily revenue.
- Calculate it (and debug it!) with a SQL query, then put it on a dashboard.
- Look at the dashboard daily.
But are you breaking the revenue by ethnicity / nationality? Are you breaking it down by paper color? Did you notice Chinese New Year?
Most likely not. In a software business, you are default blind.
The concept of organizational blindness is one of the most under-discussed challenges in digital business.
What makes this article powerful is how it shows that blindness isn’t just about lacking data or tools. It’s about constantly working with an unknown number of unknown unknowns.
Looking back, most of my career has been about building tools that make the invisible parts of work visible: first with Semaphore and CI/CD workflows in software development, and now with business operations in Operately.
There’s no silver bullet except developing a habit of actively observing and questioning what’s happening around you, and sharing what you learn with others.