The Second Digitalization: Identifying Blind Spots (What costs a lot without making a fuss)
A blind spot is not defined as ordinary ignorance, a simple lack of information that could be remedied by searching more thoroughly. It must be clearly distinguished from that. It is a structurally undetectable area from the viewing position, not because information is lacking, but because the position itself produces invisibility.
The nature of the problem (The positional impasse)
The urgent situation is clear: what you don't see is what costs you the most. A blind spot would clearly require shifting your perspective from a viewpoint that, precisely, prevents this shift.
For example, a CEO doesn't "lack" information about decision-making isolation: their CEO position structurally filters this information before it reaches them. The blind spot isn't static: it shifts with the individual's position on the surface, which justifies mapping it rather than simply listing it once and for all.
Detecting the unthought: The 3 criteria of the Blind Spot
Faced with this invisibility, three criteria distinguish a blind spot from a simple gap:
Positional, not informational: It's not that we didn't search; it's that the function, role, or interest involved makes the search itself oriented.
Visible from another point of view, invisible from one's own: This is the Johari criterion. The blind spot is often perfectly legible to a third party (colleague, client, competitor) and yet undetectable to the actor concerned.
Silent until it becomes costly: A blind spot isn't signaled by an alert; it's signaled by an absence, a "meaningful silence." Data that is never collected itself becomes emergent data.
The manifestation of the blind spot: Clients and Executives
This invisibility has major consequences for the organization. From the customer's perspective, three blind spots distort reality:
The silence of the one who leaves: The majority of dissatisfied customers never complain, they leave (we measure the liveliness of the relationship, not its solidity).
The confusion between payer and user: Excellent commercial satisfaction can mask frustration in use.
Captivity mistaken for loyalty: A customer tied down by exit costs is not necessarily a preferred customer.
On the leadership side, the observation is just as structural: we find decision-making isolation (intermediaries filter information), the unrepresentability of succession (the founder cannot imagine the company without him), and identity fusion (the company becomes an extension of the self, transforming criticism into an existential attack).
Navigating Complexity: Modeling and Revealing
To grasp this complexity, formally, we score the blind spot using the formula:
SIP=P×A×R
(Probability of occurrence × Magnitude of impact × Resistance to detection).
It is this third factor (R) that truly distinguishes the blind spot from a simple underestimated risk: the higher R is, the more the blind spot is a genuine structural oversight.
For businesses, identifying blind spots should be vital, but few do so due to a lack of technological resources. Efficient navigation is now possible thanks to La Fonderie , which we developed as part of the NPR 575 project, and which performs this analysis in just a few minutes. The "Unknown Unfnows" (unknown unknowns from the Rumsfeld report) finally become visible. The second phase of digitalization has begun exclusively for our partners.
Analysis in brief by Manufacture Thinking
The observation: The blind spot is not a lack of information, but a structural invisibility linked to the very position of the decision-maker, silently filtering the reality of the company.
The breakdown: This phenomenon is evident everywhere, from the silence of the customer who leaves without complaining to the decision-making solitude of the leader isolated by his own role.
The impact: By modeling "Resistance to detection", innovative technological tools like La Fonderie finally make it possible to map these blind spots in a few minutes.
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