I recently saw a fascinating video from a famous 1998 study called the “Door Study,” which shows an unsuspecting subject providing directions to another person. Amazingly, the subject fails to notice when the person they are speaking with is replaced as two people carrying a door pass between them. It’s a well-documented phenomenon called “change blindness.” As it turns out, the human brain has a bias toward whatever sensory inputs it deems most important at the time, at the expense of all others.
While the experiment’s findings are shocking to see, if we’re honest with ourselves, we can all probably relate. In life, our time and attention are pulled in many directions, and when we aren’t actively managing our attention, we can miss important changes around us (they grow up so fast!).
What are we missing?
A similar effect occurs in our roles as leaders. Surrounded by issues demanding our attention, it can be difficult to prioritize and easy for critical changes to slip past us.
Recently, we looked at how to cultivate organizational resilience, noting that resilience is what occurs when setback meets preparation. We found that building strong relationships — especially with customers — is a key to the kind of preparation that forges resilience.
The difficulty, of course, is that it’s hard to pay attention to our customers’ evolving needs when the sailing is smooth.
But there is one specific bias we can address now to immediately shift the balance of our organization’s attention toward our customers. Similar to change blindness, preoccupation with the competition, a form of attentional bias, takes our eye off the ever-changing needs of our customers.
Why we become competitor-focused
Leaders naturally feel competitive pressures. After all, monitoring rivals’ moves and strategies is important — it helps us understand threats, stay relevant, and protect market share. But when the focus on competition demands too much of an organization’s attention, we risk losing sight of why we exist in the first place: our customers.
Remember the Zune? You’d be forgiven if not. It was Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Apple’s iPod. It was rushed to market, emphasizing features and technology largely aimed at matching or exceeding Apple’s offering. But the Zune lacked the simplicity, user experience, and emotional connection that customers valued in Apple’s product.
It’s an all-too-common result of overemphasizing the competition, and it happens for a number of understandable reasons:
- Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Fear, of course, is a powerful motivator. Watching competitors launch new products, offer innovative features, or embark on bold campaigns can provoke anxiety. As leaders, we might react impulsively, shifting resources toward countering or mimicking competitors instead of genuinely exploring whether these moves align with customers’ true needs.
- Ease of Access to Competitor Data. It’s straightforward to gather data on competitors through market reports, news, press releases, and social media. The abundance and easy accessibility of competitor data can inadvertently skew organizational focus away from the more nuanced, time-consuming effort of deeply understanding customers.
- Reactive Decision-Making. When we define our strategy primarily by reacting to competitors, it creates a cycle of reactionary decision-making. We focus on short-term maneuvers rather than long-term investments — and ultimately, we can inadvertently empower competitors to dictate our priorities.
Shifting back to the customer
“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” — Henry Ford
While we’re busy ensuring our organizations are keeping up with the proverbial Joneses, the world keeps turning for our customers. Priorities shift. Tastes change. Plans evolve. And with our eye off the ball, we can easily miss it all, neglecting opportunities to deepen those critical relationships.
Thankfully, there are practical steps we can take to get back on track:
- Invest in Customer Insight. Customer insight should never be a secondary activity. Regular customer interviews, satisfaction surveys, user groups, and journey mapping activities can provide critical knowledge. When we embed customer insight activities into our daily operations, we ensure our decision-making remains genuinely customer-driven.
- Refine Organizational KPIs. Evaluate your organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Are they competitor-based (e.g., relative market share), or customer-based (e.g., customer satisfaction)? Prioritize KPIs that reinforce customer-centricity rather than competitor obsession.
- Cultivate a Customer-First Culture. We must continuously reinforce the message that customer relationships drive long-term success (not to mention resilience!). Organizations known for their customer-centricity, like Patagonia and Zappos, consistently emphasize the customer’s perspective, building it into the cultural DNA of the organization.
- Strategic Discipline. Adopt a disciplined approach to strategy-setting — one that focuses on how your organization uniquely serves its customers, independent of competitors’ moves. What can you do for your customers that no one else can? Build from there.
- Shift Executive Attention. As leaders, we have to consciously manage our attention, deliberately allocating time toward gaining a deep understanding of our customers. This means regularly engaging with front-line employees and directly interacting with customers.
Sharpening our customer-focused vision
The danger of the competitor-centric attentional bias — like the change blindness demonstrated in the door experiment — is how subtly and easily it obscures our view of our customers. Meaningful changes in the customer landscape can often occur quietly and gradually — hidden behind louder competitive noise.
Ultimately, we succeed not by constantly reacting to the more visible activities of our competitors, but by consistently noticing — and responding to — the quiet signals from our customers. Like the ability to clearly recognize a person standing right in front of you despite distractions, the ability to clearly discern the evolving needs of customers despite competitive distractions is a kind of superpower for long-term organizational success.
By consciously resisting the pitfall of competitor-centric change blindness, we can shift our attention back to what truly matters — the evolving needs, desires, and experiences of the customers we exist to serve.