The Next Next Common Sense Seeing is the First Step Returning to our earlier examples, Tom Watson saw the value of Joseph Woodland, but not the value in his idea or product. Management at JR East saw both the value of the maintenance worker and the value of his idea. Context matters, and what you see is a function of where you stand. In the digital age, this perceptual challenge has intensified. The building blocks that matter most—whether algorithms, data sets, user behaviors, or business model components—are often invisible or abstract. Organizations must develop new capabilities to see these building blocks and recognize their recombinatorial potential. Seeing leverage points in business situations is critical. Leverage points play an important role in a wide variety of domains. It is not that your context will allow you to see a leverage point as a leverage point— that would be like suggesting that you always should be able to predict the stock market—but rather that your context either facilitates or blocks your ability to see opportunities. Once you see them, you can act on them. If you don’t see them, you can’t. Thus seeing is the critical first step. Consider how different organizations “see” the same technological capability. When early versions of machine learning algorithms became widely available, some companies saw only a technical curiosity with limited applications. Others recognized these algorithms as fundamental building blocks that could be recombined with existing business processes to create entirely new capabilities. Amazon saw machine learning as a building block that could be com- bined with their product catalog to create recommendation engines, with their logistics network to optimize routing, and with their cloud infra- structure to create new marketable services. This multimodal vision of a single technological component’s potential created enormous leverage across their business. Similarly, when Apple developed the iPhone, they didn’t see it merely as a communication device but as a platform where multiple building blocks—camera, GPS, touchscreen, internet connectivity—could be
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