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Do We Still Dare to Look Through the Window?

November 15, 2026

By Peter Stael

Success can blind organizations to change. But what if the real challenge is not seeing change, but daring to act on it?

Successful organizations are often exceptionally good at improving what they already know. Their products, processes, and expertise have brought them success, so why question them? Yet the world outside continues to change, sometimes in ways that challenge everything they have built.

Drawing on his career in the packaging industry, Peter Stael explores why organizations struggle to respond to signals that contradict their established beliefs and why genuine innovation may ultimately depend less on technology than on the human courage to look, listen, and speak up.

Years ago, I worked for a packaging producer that had built an exceptionally strong position in its home market. With its specific packaging solution, the company claimed to have a market share of around 90% in that market.

That is a position many companies can only dream of. But the management saw something else as well. The changing public discussion around more environmentally friendly packaging was gradually affecting their position. Their solution was increasingly coming under pressure. Maybe this successful product would not remain successful forever.

The company decided not to wait. It invested heavily in a modern machine that could also process other types of film. I was asked to develop new markets outside the existing home market.

I remember telling the owners at the time: if you take this road, it is not only your product that will change. Your whole organisation will have to change with it.

They understood that. And it happened. Slowly, new customers came in. Different materials, different markets and different customers brought different demands. The organisation did indeed start to move with them.

Then the family behind the company was hit by a serious personal tragedy. Understandably, the company became less important for a while. Without real leadership, the movement that had started almost came to a standstill. When the situation temporarily improved, the new direction was picked up again. But eventually, the family lost one of its members.

What happened afterwards has always stayed with me.

The organisation did not consciously return to its old strategy. There was no meeting in which it was decided that the future was, after all, in the past. But gradually, old patterns of behaviour returned. Attention to new markets decreased. Commercial sharpness declined. Eventually, even customer complaints were almost automatically rejected.

The outside world was trying to tell the company something, but the organisation listened less and less.

And I saw it happening.

Looking back, I think I should have raised the alarm more strongly. Maybe it would not have changed anything; I was a consultant, not an owner or director. But I saw signals and did not always express them as strongly as perhaps I should have done.

A few years later, the company no longer existed.

I deliberately do not mention the name of the company. The human story behind it belongs to the family involved. But what I saw there, I have seen again since then, in other forms and circumstances.

The problem of success

My son recently told me that, in his view, many of my articles are actually about the same thing: people look as far as the window, but sometimes forget to look through it.

I found that an interesting observation.

Because inside the window is everything we know: our machines, products, customers, procedures, expertise, KPIs and regulations. And most of the time, we try to make all of them better and better. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is an important condition for success.

But while we improve what is inside, the world outside is changing at the same time.

James March described the tension between exploitation and exploration as early as 1991. Organisations need to exploit and improve existing knowledge, products and processes, while at the same time continuing to explore new possibilities. The problem is that the first usually delivers results faster and more predictably than the second.

That sounds theoretical, but I have seen it throughout my career. A machine that makes a lot of money asks for volume. A product with a large market share asks for further optimisation. An organisation that is particularly good at something has every reason to become even better at it.

Until something changes outside the window.

Kodak is often mentioned as the classic example. The company itself was involved early in digital photography, but its exceptionally successful position was built around film. Digital technology eventually changed not only the product itself, but the economic logic of the market around it.

Nokia is another well-known example. The story is more complex than Nokia simply failing to see the smartphone. The company certainly saw many of the technological developments. But meanwhile, competition increasingly shifted from the device towards software, apps and platforms.

That may be exactly what makes this so treacherous. The world outside the window does not have to be invisible at all. Sometimes we see it quite well.

But perhaps that is even the real problem. Organisations often see changes, but then become remarkably good at explaining why those changes do not yet apply to them. “The customer does not understand the product.” “The competitor is selling below cost.” “The new technology is not mature yet.” “The regulation will probably change again.”

I saw this happen in my own company. We produced a beautiful package for a German customer. Lots of colour, beautiful gold printing. Expensive. But beautiful. The customer, however, found an alternative. Clearly less beautiful. But also clearly less expensive. The warning entered our organisation, but we did not move. After all, we said: “Our product really is much more beautiful; the competitor does not come close.” The result was that we lost that design. Together with a whole range of other products from the same customer.

This example, and the explanations mentioned above, show that the signal does not disappear. We have simply found an explanation that allows us not to change yet. The market moves, but we do not move with it.

Perhaps expertise itself can become part of the problem. The more we know about why our existing solution is good, the better we may become at explaining why the outside world is so terribly wrong.

Maybe we are looking in the wrong direction

In my career, I actually had an advantage that initially did not look like an advantage at all: I had no machines.

When, through intensive sourcing, I found something new in the packaging market that could help my customers, it often took two or three years before other parties could offer the same thing. And then they had something I did not have: a machine. They could produce. I could not.

From that moment on, I had to ask myself an uncomfortable question: why should that customer still buy from me?

My old added value had disappeared. I could not make my machine run faster, because I did not have one. I could not reduce my production costs by three percent. I had to look outside again. What was changing in the market? Where was a new problem emerging? What did customers find interesting that had not been relevant two years earlier?

Looking back, I think that vulnerability strongly shaped the way I work. I constantly had to rediscover where value was being created.

Many companies do not have that pressure. Their existing business is still working. It may be coming under increasing pressure, but the cash cow is still making money. And that is exactly where the danger lies.

A cash cow gives us the means to build the future. But that same cash cow also gives us an excellent reason to continue for a little longer as we always have.

This phenomenon is well known in organisational research. Success encourages further exploitation of what already works. Moreover, attention within organisations is not distributed randomly. Structures, responsibilities and routines partly determine where people look. The product manager looks at the product, Operations at efficiency and Compliance at regulation. Everyone can do an excellent job and yet the organisation as a whole can still miss something.

It reminds me of something my professor of Ancient History once said about highly specialised historians: “We know a little about a lot. They know everything about nothing.”

It was a joke, but perhaps there is an uncomfortable truth in it. The better we become at understanding what is inside our window, the easier it becomes to forget that the world outside is under no obligation to remain the same.

The crack in the window

Fortunately, the outside world regularly tries to get in. A customer complains, an important order is lost or a new competitor appears. A discrepancy emerges between what we thought reality was and what reality is telling us in return.

Leonard Cohen once used the beautiful image of the crack through which the light gets in.

Maybe companies should look at such cracks differently.

Our natural reflex is to repair them. The complaint is handled, the deviation is closed and the new regulation is turned into a compliance checklist. Problem solved.

But by doing so, we may also remove exactly the signal that was trying to tell us something.

That is what affects me when I look back at the company I started this article with. In the beginning, the company did look through the window. The changing market was not dismissed as a passing trend. It invested before the existing market had disappeared.

Years later, almost the opposite happened. Complaints were increasingly easily rejected. The cracks were repaired and the old picture remained intact, until the reality outside the window could no longer be ignored.

Looking takes courage

That is why I think innovation is ultimately less about technology than we sometimes believe.

We can build systems to follow trends, conduct market research and ask artificial intelligence what changes are coming. But in the end, a human being looks at that information. And that person has to decide what to do with it.

That becomes difficult when what we see has consequences.

A director who really looks through the window may discover that the machine in which he invested millions yesterday could become less relevant tomorrow. An innovator may discover that his beautiful technology does not solve a problem anyone is willing to pay for. And a consultant may discover that he has to tell his customer something that customer does not want to hear.

All of that hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot.

And that is where, for me, the human side of innovation begins. Not with creativity, not with analysis, but with something much more human: courage.

The courage to look seriously at information that does not fit what we already believe. The courage not to immediately find an explanation for why the customer is wrong. And, ultimately, the courage to speak up.

I have to include myself in that.

At the company I started this article with, I saw at a certain point that old patterns were returning. I saw commercial decisions I had doubts about and I saw how complaints were increasingly kept outside the door. I spoke about it, but looking back I think: not strongly enough.

I can excuse myself: it was not my company. I did not know all the circumstances. And above everything else, there was a human tragedy that I respected then and still respect today.

But perhaps that is exactly the point.

Looking through the window is easy when what we see outside proves us right. It becomes difficult when what we see asks for an uncomfortable decision, for letting go of something that made us successful, or for words when we do not know how they will be received.

A market rarely disappears from one day to the next. What can happen from one day to the next is that a company discovers that its market has disappeared.

That is why I think that, when we talk about innovation, perhaps we should talk a little less about thinking outside the box. The problem is not necessarily that we are unable to see. Maybe we see perfectly well, but mainly look at what we already know.