By Dean Newlund
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation on the Leadovation podcast with Stephanie Trager, a coach, former attorney, and author of an upcoming book titled The Rise of the Conscious Futurist. What began as a discussion about the future quickly turned into something far more interesting: a conversation about perception itself.
At one point, Stephanie referenced a statistic that has circulated in both scientific and popular circles—that human beings perceive only a tiny fraction of the reality that exists around them. Whether the exact percentage is important is beside the point. Her metaphor was what captured my attention. She described our perception as looking through a tiny opening in our hand while most of reality remains outside our field of view.
As leaders, we rarely question that opening.
We question our strategy. We question our competitors. We question our employees, our markets, our budgets, and our assumptions about the future. But we rarely question the lens through which we are seeing any of it.
And that may be one of the greatest blind spots in modern leadership.
For most of my career, I have worked with senior leaders and executive teams navigating growth, complexity, and change. When leaders talk about blind spots, they usually mean something specific: a weakness they cannot see in themselves, a risk they have overlooked, or a market condition they failed to anticipate. Those are certainly blind spots. But there is another kind that is far more fundamental.
What if the greatest blind spot is not what we fail to see within our current worldview, but the possibility that our worldview itself is incomplete?
That may sound philosophical, but the implications are deeply practical.
Consider how often leaders become trapped by assumptions that feel self-evident. We assume employee turnover is primarily about compensation. We assume resistance to change is caused by stubbornness. We assume productivity problems require better processes. We assume customers make decisions rationally. We assume growth is always preferable to stability.
Sometimes those assumptions are correct. Often they are partially correct. But history repeatedly reminds us that the future tends to emerge from places that conventional wisdom has already dismissed.
During our conversation, Stephanie made an observation that stayed with me. She noted that traditional futurists study trends, demographics, economics, technology, and markets in order to forecast what comes next. Organizations spend enormous amounts of money on this work. Entire industries have been built around predicting the future.
But she posed a different question: What if the future being predicted is simply a reflection of the worldview of those doing the predicting?
Organizations do this all the time.
A leadership team develops a narrative about its market. A company creates a story about what customers want. An industry adopts a set of beliefs about where things are headed. Over time those beliefs become accepted truth, and eventually nobody remembers that they were assumptions in the first place.
We stop seeing the narrative because we are living inside it.
As Stephanie put it, “How do we step back and discern the narratives, discern the trends, and ask where they’re coming from? What if that information was coming from a different worldview?”
The older I get, the more interested I become in questions like that.
Not because I have become less practical, but because I have become increasingly aware of how often practical problems originate from unseen assumptions.
Many believe leadership is largely about finding better answers. I am more inclined to believe leadership begins with finding better questions.
The distinction matters.
An executive team can spend months debating how to improve engagement scores without ever asking what kind of work experience they are actually creating for people. A company can invest millions in innovation while maintaining a culture that punishes risk-taking. A leader can talk endlessly about trust without examining whether their behavior consistently creates it.
The problem is not a lack of answers. The problem is that the questions themselves are often too small.
This became especially clear as Stephanie and I began discussing intuition. Years ago, before Leadovation carried its current name, the podcast was called The Business of Intuition. I’ve long been fascinated by the role intuition plays in leadership. Most experienced leaders can point to moments when they sensed something before they could explain it. They noticed tension in a room before anyone spoke. They felt concern about a decision that looked perfectly reasonable on paper. They recognized an opportunity long before the data confirmed it.
Yet many leaders are hesitant to trust those experiences because they don’t fit neatly into a culture that prizes certainty.
As I said during our conversation, one of the challenges leaders face is distinguishing between intuition and projection. How do we know whether a feeling is insight, fear, wishful thinking, or simply our imagination?
Stephanie’s answer was surprisingly grounded. She suggested that the journey begins with knowing ourselves. The better we understand our own fears, biases, assumptions, and patterns, the easier it becomes to recognize which voice is speaking. Self-awareness becomes a form of discernment.
I think that insight applies far beyond intuition.
Organizations have identities just as people do. Teams have identities. Leaders have identities. Entire industries have identities. Those identities shape what we notice and what we ignore.
When an organization identifies itself primarily as a financial machine, certain realities become highly visible while others disappear into the background. When a leader identifies primarily as a problem-solver, they may struggle to see situations that require listening rather than fixing. When a company identifies itself as innovative, it may overlook ways it has become resistant to change.
Identity, in other words, influences perception. And perception influences everything.
One of the most compelling moments in our conversation occurred when we discussed the worldview of indigenous cultures. Stephanie has spent years learning from indigenous communities throughout the Americas. When I asked what wisdom they might offer a typical CEO, her answer surprised me.
Listening.
Not strategy. Not innovation. Not growth.
Listening.
She described a worldview in which nature is not merely a stakeholder affected by decisions but a participant in decision-making itself. Whether one agrees with that perspective literally or metaphorically is less important than the invitation it presents. What voices have we excluded from the conversation? What realities have we trained ourselves not to hear?
Most leaders I know are drowning in information. They do not need more reports, more dashboards, more metrics, or more notifications.
What they often need is a greater capacity to notice.
To notice assumptions. To notice patterns. To notice contradictions. To notice possibilities. To notice what is absent.
The pace of modern leadership makes this increasingly difficult. Organizations reward speed, responsiveness, and execution. Reflection often feels indulgent. Curiosity can seem inefficient. Slowing down feels dangerous.
Yet many of the most expensive mistakes organizations make are not failures of execution. They are failures of perception.
The signals were there.
The future was already whispering.
Nobody was listening.
As our conversation drew to a close, I found myself returning to a question that has followed me throughout much of my work: What if there is more happening here than we currently see?
Not as a mystical question.
As a leadership question.
As a strategic question.
As a human question.
Every major breakthrough in history began when someone challenged the limits of accepted perception. They looked beyond what appeared obvious and became curious about what else might be true.
Perhaps leadership requires the same courage.
Perhaps the future belongs not to those who possess the most information, but to those who cultivate the broadest awareness. Those who remain curious when others become certain. Those who continue asking questions after everyone else has settled on answers. Those who recognize that reality is always larger than the portion currently visible through the opening in our hand.
Because the greatest blind spot in leadership may not be what we don’t know.
It may be what we’ve never considered looking for.