What You Can’t See

The problem usually isn’t your messaging. It’s those years inside your own business that have made it very difficult to see it the way someone else does.

That’s a frustrating thing to sit with, particularly if you’ve invested real time thinking about how you communicate what you do. But the depth of understanding you’ve built over ten, fifteen, twenty years, the clarity you feel about your own business, is also the thing that makes it genuinely hard to see what a stranger sees when they look at you. The two things grow together, and they’re not easily separated.

In 2015, a photograph of a dress became one of the strangest collective arguments the internet had produced. The question was simple, or so it seemed — what colour is it? Except there was no agreement. Half the world saw white and gold. The other half saw blue and black. Both groups were looking at identical images on identical screens. Neither side was guessing carelessly or being deliberately contrary. The difference was in how each person’s visual system interpreted the available light, specifically the assumptions the brain made about the lighting conditions in the photograph. Different assumptions, shaped by different prior experiences, produce two completely different realities from the same source material.

What made it linger wasn’t the novelty. It was the slightly unsettling realisation that what you see isn’t simply what’s there. It’s what your brain constructs from what’s there, based on everything you’ve already seen before. Perception is not passive. It’s an act of interpretation, happening so fast and so automatically that it feels like pure observation.

There’s an older example that makes the same point in a different way. A drawing that’s been circulating since the late 1800s, sometimes called “The Young Woman and the Old Woman.” One image, two figures, both fully visible within it, but almost impossible to see simultaneously. Once your brain has found the young woman, it defaults to her. Locating the old woman requires deliberate effort, a conscious shift in where you’re looking and what you’re looking for. And for many people, even knowing the second figure is there isn’t enough to find it easily. The entry point shapes everything. What you were already expecting to see determines, to a considerable degree, what you’re able to see.

This is precisely what happens over the years inside a business.

You build a map. Detailed, accurate, hard-won. You know why the pricing works the way it does. You know what the service was designed to solve, and what it was deliberately designed not to. You understand the decisions that look strange from the outside but make complete sense given what you were navigating at the time. That map is genuine expertise, and it matters enormously. But it becomes the lens through which you view everything, including how you look at your own business from the outside.

The difficulty is that you can no longer really see it from the outside. You think you can. You step back, try to read your own website fresh, and imagine encountering yourself for the first time. But the map is always there. It fills in the gaps, provides context, and makes the ambiguous parts feel clear. What you’re seeing is never quite what someone new sees, because you are not someone new, and you haven’t been for a long time.

Your customer arrives without the map. They come with their own version, assembled from previous experiences, current frustrations, and their particular version of the problem you believe you’re solving. When they look at what you offer, they don’t see your intent. They’re not seeing the fifteen iterations, the rationale, the history. They’re seeing what’s visible. And what’s visible to them, from where they’re standing, can be quite different from what you’d assume they’re seeing.

This isn’t a failure of marketing in the conventional sense. Writing it more clearly, explaining it more thoroughly, helps to a point. But they don’t close the fundamental gap between internal and external perspectives. The map cannot be transferred by making the website longer.

The same dynamic plays out inside organisations, and it’s just as quietly costly. A leadership team that has been together through difficult years. All the near-misses, the pivots, the periods that required a kind of conviction hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there, build a shared internal reality that’s almost entirely invisible to people who’ve recently arrived. They’ve calibrated their expectations of what’s possible based on real experience. They understand each other’s shorthand without noticing they’re using it. And they’ve largely lost the ability to see the business as someone stepping in for the first time would.

New people arrive and see something different. Not uninformed, necessarily. Just standing somewhere else. And the understandable, usually well-intentioned instinct is to bring them up to speed. To provide the context. To help them see it properly. And sometimes that’s entirely right. But sometimes, what they’re seeing before it gets corrected is worth paying attention to.

There is a moment in most businesses when the internal and external views diverge enough to matter. Not dramatically. Not in ways that show up immediately on a spreadsheet. But in how the business is understood by people who don’t live inside it. Customers who aren’t quite buying what you think you’re selling. Partners who describe you differently than you’d describe yourself. Referrals that arrive expecting something slightly different from what you deliver. The business is clear on what it is. It’s just that clarity is largely internal.

The harder question to ask, even harder than “why don’t they see what I see?”, is “what are they seeing that I’m not?” Not because every outside perception is accurate. Not because customers are always right, or that every piece of unsolicited feedback is insight worth acting on. But because the gap between your view and someone else’s is rarely random. It’s usually information. And it’s information that’s disproportionately difficult to access the longer you’ve been inside.

The businesses that handle this well are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated customer insight processes. They’re the ones whose leaders have stayed genuinely curious about the outside view, even after they had every reason to trust only their own. Who have kept some connection to how the business looks from positions they can no longer naturally occupy. Those who have made a habit of asking what’s visible rather than assuming they already know.

You know your business deeply. That’s not in question. But depth of knowledge and clarity of external perception are not the same thing. After enough time, they move in different directions.

The question worth sitting with is simply this:

When did you last really know what someone else sees when they look at you?

Not what you’ve told them. Not what you hope they see.

Just what’s actually visible, from out there.

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers – The Business Explorer

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