Has anyone ever tried to make an “industry expert” think about changing their business model or the way they run their organisation because of new market conditions or technology or the environment or just plain evolution?

It is an almost impossible task. I should know since I spend a lot of time trying to make these ‘experts’ think differently.

Over the years, from my work in different industries, I have observed that one of the biggest risks in most businesses is not lack of experience. It is too much certainty created by experience.

When we walk into a situation thinking, “We have seen this before,” we unconsciously place a perceptual filter between ourselves and reality. From that point onward, we stop observing carefully. We start matching patterns.

A customer who asks many questions becomes “another difficult client”. An employee who challenges us becomes “the usual trouble maker”. A dynamic market becomes “the same cycle”. And because we expect sameness, difference becomes harder to detect.

The resulting blinders can make us miss critical details, ignore changing conditions, and slip into autopilot. Worse, they can make us presumptuous about our expertise, our judgment, and even our safety.

A sales team may lose a client because they assumed the objection was about price when it was actually about trust. A senior executive may dismiss a younger employee’s concern because “we have handled this before,” only to realize later that the environment had fundamentally changed.

Every situation carries a different context and every individual has different fears, different motivations, and different ways of seeing the world.

A company may continue using the same playbook in a changing market because past success created confidence but now that same strategy turns into rigidity.

Experience matters. But experience should sharpen observation, not replace it. No two jobs, customers, markets or problems are exactly the same. The danger begins when familiarity convinces us that we already understand what we have not yet fully observed.

The best professionals are not the ones who assume they know. They are the ones experienced enough to know how much they might still be missing.