Curiosity vs. Certainty

In 1975, Brian Eno was recovering from a car accident in his London flat. A friend visited and, before leaving, put on a record of eighteenth-century harp music. The volume was set too low. Eno, stuck in bed and unable to get up and adjust it, could barely hear the music over the rain against the window.

Most people would have found this annoying. Eno found it interesting.

He lay there and listened. Some passages barely reached him, and he began to wonder what the music was doing at the edge of attention. What did it mean for sound to be part of an environment rather than its focal point?

From that question, Eno gave a genre its name and its philosophy: ambient music. Today it’s all around us, from meditation apps to airport terminals to therapy rooms. It came from a man too unwell to reach a volume dial, yet curious about what that revealed.

Eno didn’t set out to invent anything. He stumbled into an anomaly, a result that didn’t match what he expected. Instead of fixing it, he got curious about what it was doing.

Contrast that with Mike Lazaridis, the engineer behind BlackBerry. In the mid-2000s, BlackBerry had made mobile communication indispensable to the world’s professionals. It was in the pockets of presidents, executives, pop stars and anyone whose life depended on being reachable. It was so addictive it earned the nickname “CrackBerry”.

I was a huge fan.

The physical, tactile keyboard was BlackBerry’s signature feature and the reason users said they loved it. Lazaridis was certain it would win. The iPhone was an interesting consumer gadget, but the keyboard mattered too much, the security was too hard to replicate, and corporate customers would not switch.

They did. Not overnight. BlackBerry sales kept rising for years after the iPhone launched, and every warning sign was explained away. Then the decline came, and it came fast. The users who had sworn they would never give up their keyboards gave them up.

BlackBerry’s failure was a failure of curiosity. Its certainty left no room for questions.

Eno and Lazaridis both met something unexpected. One leaned in and let it reshape his thinking. The other explained it away with a model he already trusted. Lazaridis was certain because he had been right for a decade. That’s what makes certainty so dangerous. Success teaches us to stop looking.

I was certain too. I loved that keyboard.

The next time something surprising shows up in your data, your customers or your market, ask the question Eno asked. Not ‘how do I fix this?’ but ‘what is this telling me?’

This story appears in full in The Insightful Entrepreneur: Why Some People See What Others Miss. The book will be available to buy in January 2027

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What Jane Goodall Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Seeing

In July 1960, a twenty-six-year-old woman arrived at Gombe Stream in what is now Tanzania, having talked her way into a research opportunity that almost nobody in the scientific establishment thought was a good idea.

She had no formal scientific training. She had never conducted field research. Her qualifications amounted to a lifelong fascination with animals and a job as secretary to the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who saw something in her that others didn’t. And she proposed studying wild chimpanzees not from a distance, through binoculars and clipboards, but up close. Sitting among them, watching them, learning their individual personalities and naming them rather than numbering them.

When her work later reached the academic world, the reaction was sceptical. Naming animals, she was told, was the kind of anthropomorphic sentimentality that had no place in rigorous research.

Jane Goodall ignored it all and kept watching.

The months when nothing happened

The chimpanzees fled whenever she came near. So she arrived at first light, sat quietly at a distance that didn’t alarm them, and watched. She kept notes on what she saw. Day after day.

Slowly, one older male began to tolerate her presence. She named him David Greybeard. He was the first to stop running, and through him, the others gradually came to accept her too.

Then, on 4 November 1960, she saw something that would overturn one of biology’s foundational assumptions. She watched David Greybeard pick a stem of grass, strip it of its leaves, push it into a termite mound and pull it out covered in termites to eat. He wasn’t just using a tool. He had made one.

At the time, toolmaking was considered the defining trait of our species. When Goodall reported what she had seen, Leakey replied: ‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’

From observation to pattern

The sighting made headlines. But on its own, it could have been dismissed as a curiosity. One clever chimpanzee doing one clever thing.

What turned it into science was what Goodall saw next, over the months and years that followed. Other chimpanzees doing the same thing. Juveniles watching adults closely, then trying it themselves, failing, and trying again. The behaviour being practised, refined and passed from one generation to the next.

What had looked like an isolated event revealed itself as something far bigger: evidence of social learning, of culture, in an animal other than us.

One observation made headlines. The pattern changed our understanding of what it means to be human.

Why this matters for entrepreneurs

The move from observation to pattern is where the most valuable entrepreneurial thinking happens.

Most people notice interesting things. A queue outside an unusual shop. A workaround a customer has invented. A habit that seems to be spreading among younger consumers. The difference is what happens next. Most people file it as a curiosity and move on.

Insightful entrepreneurs ask a different question: where else am I seeing this?

When the same underlying behaviour shows up in different places, in different industries or among different groups of people, that’s no longer an anecdote. It’s a signal. And signals are where opportunities live.

The entrepreneurs who seem to spot opportunities before anyone else are not operating purely on instinct. They draw on an internalised library they have built through sustained, curious attention to how the world works. Across industries, across cultures, across time. When something new appears, they recognise it, because they have seen its shape before somewhere else.

The library is what makes the pattern visible.

And the encouraging part is this: you don’t have to be born with it. Like Goodall at Gombe, you build it by showing up, paying attention and writing down what you see. Patiently, often for a long time before anything seems to happen.

Recognition is built one observation at a time.

This story appears in full in my book The Insightful Entrepreneur: Why Some People See What Others Miss, coming out in January 2027.

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Why Are We Tolerating This?

In last week’s post, I briefly mentioned how rolling luggage was invented. Here’s the story.

It is 1970, and Bernard Sadow is sweating. He is dragging two enormous suitcases through a customs hall in Puerto Rico, returning from a family holiday in Aruba. Every few steps, he has to stop, set the heavy bags down, flex his aching, blistered fingers and catch his breath. All around him, thousands of other travellers are doing exactly the same thing. Businessmen in tailored suits, exhausted parents with toddlers. All leaning sideways, faces strained, lugging dead weight by tiny leather handles.

This was the golden age of aviation. Humanity had just put a man on the moon. Yet down here on Planet Earth, our most advanced method for moving luggage through a vast, modern airport was the same one used by medieval peasants: pick it up and carry it.

As Sadow pauses to wipe his forehead, an airport worker glides past. He is effortlessly pulling a heavy piece of machinery on a wooden pallet fitted with four caster wheels.

Sadow stares at the gliding machine. Then he looks down at his immobile suitcases. Then back at the worker. Millions of people had complained about heavy luggage for decades. Some had even tried to fix it. But nobody had made it stick, because nobody was really asking the obvious question.

Why are we tolerating this?

Sadow had collided with what I call a normalised frustration.

When a struggle is new, it is irritating. But when a struggle persists for years, human beings do something remarkable: we adapt. We accept the friction as the inevitable cost of doing things. Lugging heavy bags through endless terminals was exhausting, but for travellers in 1970, it was simply the price of a plane ticket.

Sadow refused to accept that. He went home, took a standard suitcase, attached four caster wheels to the bottom, added a strap to the front and built a prototype. Two years later he patented it.

Then something revealing happened. He took his rolling suitcase to department stores, and they turned him down. Buyers insisted nobody would want it. Some thought men would never pull a bag on wheels. The frustration was so normalised that even the people selling luggage couldn’t see the problem. It took one buyer at Macy’s to give it a chance. It sold.

Once you start looking for normalised frustrations, they are surprisingly hard to stop seeing. Think about the small frictions you’ve tolerated recently. The queue you stood in without complaint. The printer that refuses to connect to your laptop. The faff of paying at a parking meter.

Every one of them is worth questioning, and any one of them could become a business opportunity. Ask yourself:

Why am I tolerating this?

Sadow’s story shows that most opportunities don’t come from the future. They’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.

This story is one of many in my book, The Insightful Entrepreneur: Why Some People See What Others Miss, out in January 2027. It’s a book about entrepreneurial insight as a practice you can learn, not a trait you’re born with.

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The Lone Genius Myth

When I ask students in my entrepreneurship classes who comes to mind when they hear the word ‘entrepreneur’, the same person is named without fail: Steve Jobs. Would he be your choice too?

With his signature blue jeans and black turtleneck, he’s often pictured as a single figure on a big stage. A hero to many. A bold, driven individual who overcomes obstacles to achieve his singular vision.

This is the myth of the entrepreneur. A visionary. Someone who sees the future before the rest of us.

Yet this story we tell ourselves is wrong in almost every aspect.

So where did this myth come from?

We can trace it back to the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Writing in the early twentieth century, he described the entrepreneur as a figure driven by a near-heroic ‘will to conquer’, someone who breaks through the ordinary economic order through sheer force of personality.

Decades later, Ayn Rand’s novels, notably The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, gave that figure a moral shine. They feature an exceptional individual, unappreciated by the masses, who reshapes the world through uncompromising self-belief.

This image didn’t stay in economics textbooks or novels. It migrated, almost intact, into how Silicon Valley talks about itself, and it shapes who gets backed as investors look for the next Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead.

A story we’ve come to love

Walk through any airport bookshop and you’ll see familiar faces staring out from the business section: Richard Branson, Elon Musk and, of course, Steve Jobs. Business magazines celebrate their brilliance. Business school case studies deify them, as do ad agencies and brand consultancies. Hollywood makes films about them. All of this keeps the myth alive.

But the myth doesn’t hold up

Even Jobs doesn’t fit. Steve Wozniak designed and built the first Apple computer. Jobs was pushed out of his own company in 1985, and Apple’s later revival depended on a team, not a lone hero.

When I began researching real entrepreneurial stories, very few matched the archetype. Instead, I found that the most successful entrepreneurs pay the closest attention to others, not to themselves. They see frustrations that others have normalised. They notice needs that others haven’t articulated. They sense tensions in people’s lives that nobody has yet resolved.

Take Bernard Sadow. He didn’t invent the wheeled suitcase through some grand vision. Hauling heavy bags through an airport, he noticed a worker rolling a heavy load on a wheeled pallet, and saw what everyone else had walked straight past.

Why it matters

This myth isn’t only inaccurate; it’s damaging. It implies that entrepreneurs are born, not made, and that the rest of us, who experience doubt and uncertainty, aren’t made of the right stuff. It tells people with excellent instincts, genuine curiosity and real capability that entrepreneurship isn’t for them.

As a teacher of innovation and entrepreneurship, I found this disheartening. So I decided to write a book that challenges the belief that being entrepreneurial requires you to be a special kind of person.

Instead, I found that seeing opportunities, the foundational entrepreneurial skill, is a capability anyone can develop. The stories in the book all point to the same conclusion: none of these people relied on an innate gift the rest of us lack. They learnt to pay a specific kind of attention in moments when most people paid none.

This is the opening argument of my book, The Insightful Entrepreneur: Why Some People See What Others Miss, which will be published in January 2027.

Over the coming months, this blog series will share excerpts from the book: the key stories I discovered, the lessons I learnt, and what stops us seeing clearly, along with what we can do about it.

The opportunities were always there. They still are.

The question is whether you’re looking.

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Innovation Leadership: The Human Work Behind the Big Ideas

This series has covered a great deal of ground. Frameworks and methodologies, strategies and processes, cultures and measurement systems. But there is a thread running through all of it that has not been examined directly: the people responsible for making innovation happen.

Leadership matters in any organisational context. In the context of innovation, it matters more than almost anywhere else. The conditions that make innovation possible – psychological safety, tolerance for failure, a culture of curiosity, structural alignment between aspiration and practice are built, sustained, and sometimes defended against significant organisational resistance by the people in a position to shape them. Getting this right is the most important element of the whole enterprise.

What Innovation Leadership Actually Requires

Leadership in general is often described as the art of getting things done through people. Innovation leadership requires something more specific: getting things done through people in conditions of high uncertainty, in the face of resistance from systems and cultures designed to maintain the status quo, and without the reassurance of knowing in advance that the effort will succeed.

This requires a distinctive combination of capabilities. The skills that make an excellent operational manager – precision, consistency, the ability to execute to plan – are necessary but not sufficient for leading innovation. They may, in fact, be actively counterproductive if they are applied to innovation activity without adjustment.

Intellectual curiosity and comfort with not knowing. Innovation leaders need to be genuinely interested in the world: in how things work, why people behave as they do, what is changing in the environment, and what those changes might mean. They need to be comfortable with open questions and able to resist organisational pressure to resolve uncertainty prematurely by asserting a conclusion that the evidence does not yet support. The leader who projects confidence by providing answers in situations that genuinely require more questions is one of the most reliable inhibitors of innovative thinking in any organisation.

The ability to hold creative tension. Innovation requires the simultaneous maintenance of perspectives that, in the short term, are in tension. Exploration and exploitation. Long-term investment and short-term performance. Radical ambition and realistic constraint. Disciplined process and genuine creative freedom. Holding the tension without prematurely resolving it is one of the most demanding and essential leadership capabilities in an innovation context.

Courage to sponsor and protect. Good innovation leadership requires the willingness to put organisational credibility behind ideas that are not yet proven, to allocate resources to possibilities that cannot yet demonstrate a return, and to protect early-stage innovation from the organisational immune system. The combination of process, culture, and vested interest tends to reject new ideas before they have had the chance to mature. This sponsorship role is not glamorous. It rarely generates the recognition that visible innovation victories do. But without it, promising ideas die quietly in committees, and nothing changes.

Connecting innovation to purpose. The most sustained and culturally embedded innovation tends to happen in organisations where the purpose behind the innovation is clear and genuinely motivating. Where people understand not just what they are building but why it matters. Innovation leadership involves making that connection explicit and credible: linking the work of innovation to outcomes that the people doing it find meaningful, and sustaining that connection through the inevitable periods of uncertainty and difficulty.

The Challenge of Ambidexterity

One of the most discussed concepts in the literature on innovation leadership is organisational ambidexterity - the capacity to manage the existing business and pursue innovation simultaneously. The term comes from the research of Michael Tushman and Charles O'Reilly, who observed that organisations most successful over long periods were those that could both exploit their existing capabilities efficiently and explore new possibilities effectively simultaneously.

This is, as anyone who has tried it will confirm, genuinely difficult. The demands of running the existing business are immediate, concrete, and relentless. The demands of developing innovations are longer-term, more ambiguous, and easier to defer. In most organisations, the urgent crowds out the important with a regularity that is both predictable and damaging.

Ambidextrous leadership addresses this not by pretending the tension does not exist, but by managing it explicitly. This sometimes means structural separation. By creating distinct units, teams, or spaces for innovation that are insulated from the operational pressures of the core business. It sometimes means temporal separation: protecting dedicated time for innovation within the organisation’s normal rhythm. It always means leadership that is willing to sustain both demands simultaneously, resisting the gravitational pull toward one at the expense of the other.

Leading Teams That Innovate

Innovation is rarely a solo activity. It happens in teams, and the quality of those teams – their composition, dynamics, psychological safety, and relationship to the broader organisation – has an enormous influence on the quality of the innovation they produce.

Leading innovative teams requires some specific attention to dimensions that more conventional team leadership can afford to treat as secondary.

Diversity in its fullest sense. The value of cognitive diversity – bringing people with different backgrounds, disciplines, and ways of thinking into the same problem-solving space – is well established. But assembling a diverse team is not enough. Inclusive leadership is what makes diversity valuable: the deliberate effort to ensure that different perspectives actually shape the thinking, rather than being present in the room but marginalised in the process.

This is harder than hiring diversely. It requires active attention to whose ideas are taken seriously, who gets credit, and whose discomfort with an emerging consensus is treated as a useful signal rather than an obstacle.

Navigating failure with intelligence. Innovative teams will fail. The only question is whether they fail in ways that yield useful learning or incur costs. Innovation leaders need to create the conditions in which failure is examined rather than buried. Where the question asked of an unsuccessful experiment is not ‘whose fault was this?’ but ‘what does this tell us that we didn't know before?’ This requires both cultural intent and structural practice: post-mortems that are genuinely diagnostic rather than defensive, a vocabulary around failure that distinguishes between intelligent risk-taking and avoidable mistake, and visible behaviour from the leader that models the approach they are asking others to take.

Maintaining momentum through uncertainty. Innovation projects frequently pass through phases in which nothing seems to be working, the problem proves harder than anticipated, the original hypothesis has been disproved, and a new direction has not yet been found. These phases are psychologically demanding, and the leader's response to them – whether they project steadiness or anxiety, whether they hold the space for continued exploration or reach prematurely for a solution – is one of the most significant influences on whether the team finds its way through.

The Personal Development of Innovation Leaders

Working in contexts of genuine uncertainty – in early-stage ventures, in cross-functional teams tackling novel problems, in organisations undergoing significant change – builds the tolerance for ambiguity that innovation leadership requires.

Working across disciplines and sectors, outside the comfort zone of deep functional expertise, builds the connective thinking and the comfort with not-knowing that creative problem-solving demands.

Mentorship from leaders who have genuinely navigated the tensions of innovation, who have sponsored risky ideas, protected innovation from organisational resistance, and maintained their own curiosity and openness through long careers, is a development resource of considerable value that most organisations underuse.

And reflection: the disciplined practice of examining your own assumptions, your responses to uncertainty, your instinctive preferences and how they shape the environment you create for others, is as important for innovation leaders as it is for leaders in any other context. Perhaps more so, because the impact of a leader's mindset on the innovative capacity of the people around them is both more powerful and less visible than most leaders appreciate.

Closing the Series

This post has explored what it takes to lead innovation effectively. In doing so, it has also arrived at something like a summary of the whole series: innovation is a human activity, shaped by culture and leadership more than by process and technology, and it requires the same qualities from the people who lead it as it asks of the organisations they are trying to build.

Curiosity.

Intellectual honesty.

The willingness to be wrong.

The courage to commit to possibilities that cannot yet be proven.

The patience to let ideas develop.

The clarity to know what you are trying to achieve and why would you be able to tell me?

And the generosity to create conditions in which other people can do their best thinking.

Simple to say, but difficult to practice. The organisations and the leaders that manage it, consistently and over time, are the ones that keep finding new ways to make a difference.

That, ultimately, is what innovation is for.