The Signals You Chose Not to Look For
Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you actively searched for evidence that your current strategy might be wrong?
Most competitive intelligence work ultimately confirms that the plan is working. People do not call it that—they say they are monitoring, tracking, or keeping informed. But in practice, it is just confirmation.
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
– Sherlock Holmes, in “A Scandal in Bohemia”
The Habit Beneath the Failure
This starts as an individual habit long before it becomes an organisational one.
Think about how you follow your market. You have sources you check often. You picked those sources for good reasons at the time, but you probably have not reviewed them since.
Every set of information you use has a pattern, and that pattern shapes what you notice. If you mostly pay attention to your current customers, competitors, and industry definitions, you will spot changes inside those areas quickly, but miss changes outside them.
The biggest threats to a business rarely come from the competitors you watch closely. They usually come from areas no one is watching. And it’s those assumptions too.
Why Smart Teams Get This Wrong
Intelligence is not mainly about analysis. Mistakes in analysis are easy to spot and fix because someone can check the logic.
Collection errors are harder to see. If no one gathered evidence about something, there is no obvious gap in the report. The report looks complete, but completeness and full coverage are not the same; only completeness is visible in the document.
This is why even capable organisations get surprised—not because their analysis was bad, but because the important information was never collected in the first place.
The Question Behind the Question
There is a distinction worth holding onto here.
Trying to predict which future will happen is hard and often not useful. Figuring out which future is happening right now is a different job and much more doable.
The first approach means you have to guess the world correctly. The second means you need to look in enough directions.
Most teams focus on predicting the future and ignore the need to watch for what is actually happening. They debate what might happen but collect little evidence, and then blame bad luck when they are surprised.
What Changes When You Invert It
The change in approach is small, but the impact is big.
Stop asking your team what they think will happen. Instead, ask what early evidence would show if each possible future were starting, and whether anyone is watching for it.
The first question leads to a discussion. The second leads to a plan for collecting evidence.
This approach has another benefit. When you define what evidence you need, you quickly see how much of your confidence is based on things you have not actually checked. That realisation can be uncomfortable, but it is the most valuable part of the exercise.
Organisations that handle change well are not better at predicting the future. They are just set up to find out what is happening sooner.
A Question to Consider
Which of your current beliefs about your market would be the most expensive to be wrong about, and what evidence are you collecting that could show you are?
Practical Advice
Write down the five sources you use most often. Figure out what those sources cannot tell you, then find one new source that fills that gap and use it for the next month.
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