Awareness
Why capable people and firms stay blind to the obvious, and what it costs them, until a crisis or an outsider forces the blind spot into view.
We all reason from assumptions we can't see. Experts and organizations most of all. The very expertise that makes you good at something quietly narrows what you even consider, and most of the time you never notice the narrowing. Then a crisis hits, or an outsider who never absorbed those assumptions walks in and asks the obvious question, and the blind spot is suddenly in plain view.
I've spent twenty years on the machinery underneath that. What makes it into the set of things you even consider, how that set forms, why it hardens, why it's so hard to update from the inside, and what it actually takes to shift. The work began as research on cognition in strategy, ran through years of building AI systems that forced me to watch my own assumptions break in real time, and has become a formal model of how awareness works and where it fails.
Where it comes from
This isn't a new departure. It's the question I've been circling for twenty years, finally made explicit. The thread runs from my undergraduate thesis, through my doctoral work on cognition and strategy and the research that came out of it, and more recently through building AI systems that kept breaking my own assumptions.
Play with it Coming soon
The model isn't only an argument, it's something you can run. I'm building interactive simulators that let you set the assumptions a mind, a firm, or a market reasons from, then watch how blind spots form, spread, and finally break. These are the heart of this page, and they're on the way.
Go deeper Coming soon
The formal version lives in working papers I'm developing, building the model from first principles and applying it from the single mind outward, to firms, to markets, to the institutions they harden into. As the papers land they'll appear on the research page, and each simulator here will show the results you can read there.
More soon.