It’s raining, and your basement is flooding. The team reacts with impressive speed. People jump in, buckets are found, and water gets moved. Someone creates a status report… someone else turns the bailing process into a process. It feels productive because it is active. But after the adrenaline fades, you realize: We got very good at moving water but we never built a roof.
This is a corporate bubble many of us get stuck in on a regular basis. And it happens in a practical, yet expensive way. You don’t wake up one day and decide to ignore the market. You simply fill your days so completely with internal, “necessary” work that the outside world becomes a rounding error. Inside the bubble, the signals are consistent and the trade-offs feel rational. The cadence gives you the comforting sense that things are under control. Meanwhile, reality is still outside.
Inside your bubble, everything makes sense. And that’s the problem.
Your Org Is an Attention Machine
A lack of information is seldom the reason for that. Quite the opposite is true, and one can even argue that the abundance of information might be even part of the problem aka information overload. The problem in the bubble is lack of attention. Most people have access to enough data to make better decisions, yet they fail to allocate attention to it.
Organizational design is, at its core, an attention machine. It dictates what gets airtime, what gets rewarded, and what gets (politely) postponed. This is the “attention-based view” of the organisation: what leaders notice and discuss eventually becomes what the organization becomes. If your governance routines mainly surface internal issues (such as process compliance, reporting, approvals) you will inevitably live in a building that is obsessed with its basement. You will run “alignment” sessions to keep the mopping coordinated, failing to realize that most alignment meetings are just group mopping.
Why Smart Teams Miss the Obvious
Two psychological mechanisms conspire to keep you looking downward. The first is inattentional blindness. As demonstrated by the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, when your brain is locked onto a demanding task, it literally edits the rest of the world out. When your attention is locked on internal friction, market shifts are rendered invisible.
The second mechanism is threat rigidity. When we feel pressured, our attention narrows and our options shrink. The organization instinctively falls back on what it already knows how to do. You don’t open windows… you close doors. This creates a dangerous feedback loop:
More pressure → narrower attention → more internal activity → less external sensing → more surprises
If you don’t schedule the outside world, you will meet it later as an incident.
When Efficiency Eats Adaptation
We are seeing this play out in real-time with Artificial Intelligence. Consider the standard boardroom discussion regarding budget pressure. Someone asks the reasonable question: “Why should we pay AI subscriptions for everyone? It’s expensive.” Inside the bubble of cost management, that is a winning sentence. It sounds disciplined. It protects the margin. It keeps the basement tidy.
Six months later, that same room asks a different question: “Why does our workforce have no LLM skills yet?” Everyone looks around, baffled, as if skills were supposed to appear through osmosis.
Nothing surprising happened here. You simply made a choice about attention. You chose to focus on cost hygiene and told yourself you were being responsible, but the “roof work” didn’t happen and the rain kept raining. The depressing reality is that the signals were right there. You saw peers adopting, roles shifting, and the productivity gap forming. We had all the information at hand, but we narrated the trend instead of moving with it.
The Trap of “Now”
When an organization becomes obsessed with the present (the basement) it creates a specific kind of blindness toward the periphery. Right now, AI is dominating attention. But when one topic becomes the socially accepted definition of “future-ready,” everything else gets downgraded to “later.”
Take quantum computing as a prime example. It isn’t a priority for next quarter’s P&L, so it gets filtered out by the attention machine. But new capabilities form hidden-in-plain sight for a long time, then show up suddenly when the distribution or cost curve flips. You don’t need a specific quantum strategy, but you do need a sensing system that doesn’t depend on hype to notice what matters.
And don’t get me wrong here. The danger isn’t missing a specific technology, but the habit of narrowing your scan to whatever the internal room already agrees is important. While you are scanning the competitors that look like you, you miss the one that isn’t playing your game. The competitor you didn’t track is usually the one that changed the rules, not the one that copied your features.
Building the roof means living with a wet basement for a while
This is where things get a bit… uncomfortable. You don’t fix a flooded basement by getting better at buckets. You fix it by building a roof. But building a roof while it’s raining means you have to tolerate a wet basement for a while.
Many organizations simply cannot tolerate that trade-off. They treat every puddle in the basement as proof that the roof plan was naïve and work must stop. They interpret discomfort as “we’re losing control.” So they run back downstairs, grab the buckets, and call it responsibility.
Consequently, strategy becomes purely conceptual and the critical roof work remains reactionary. Outdated organizational designs make this almost inevitable: too many approvals, handoffs, and internal rituals keep everyone facing inward. You can run a very “professional” company and still be deeply out of touch… a thousand “not now” decisions that sound reasonable in the moment.
The tough part is not the roof itself. The hardest part is standing there while it’s still raining, the basement is still wet, and you still say: we’re building it anyway.
The Roof Check
Put a 25-minute “Roof Check” on the calendar every month. In that meeting, you answer three questions out loud, in normal language:
- What changed outside this month?
- Which assumption inside our building does that challenge?
- What are we doing about it specifically?
One external signal. One assumption named. One action assigned.
It is meant to be survivable. It forces the outside world into your calendar without creating a new “strategic thinking” tribe.
Relevance is a scheduling problem before it is a strategy problem. If you don’t schedule the outside world, the basement will eventually win.