Long before I had language for entrepreneurship, foresight or Life Systems Design, I was a child intensely curious about what sits beyond the immediately visible — in people, in ideas and in the world around me.
I wanted to understand what sat behind the obvious — how things worked, why people could encounter the same world yet see it differently, and what might be possible beyond what was already there. Science gave that curiosity discipline. Entrepreneurship later gave it agency. Foresight gave it a relationship with the future.
THEN, MORE THAN 25 YEARS AGO
I was waiting for a friend in a library in Nigeria when I came across a few words by Helen Keller:
“The seeing see little.”
I didn't know then how long that idea would stay with me.
Years later, I would spend much of my academic career studying and teaching entrepreneurship, innovation and how opportunities emerge. And I kept encountering versions of the same puzzle:
Why can highly intelligent people look at the same world — and see entirely different possibilities?
Why do some opportunities remain almost invisible until someone creates them? Why can one person see constraint where another sees possibility? And why, when circumstances change, are some people able to reinvent, recombine and create again?
EVENTUALLY, THE QUESTION BECAME PERSONAL.
I had to learn to see beyond the life I had already built.
Across my own career, I have moved through at least five significant professional transitions — across academia, consulting, executive education, entrepreneurship and the work I am building today.
One of the biggest came when I stepped away from a decade-long full-time university career. I wasn't escaping a failed life. I was leaving something I knew how to succeed at because I could increasingly see possibilities that the existing path could not contain.
Capable people can become exceptionally good at succeeding inside a life that is becoming too small for who they are becoming.
So instead of simply making another leap, I began applying the ideas I had spent years researching, teaching and practising — entrepreneurship, effectuation, innovation, systems thinking, design and strategic foresight — to a different question:
Can we develop the capability to keep seeing, creating and shaping new possibilities as our lives — and the world around us — change?
THE QUESTION TRAVELLED WITH ME
I've since explored versions of it with managers and executives, professionals reconsidering what comes next, entrepreneurs and practitioners, and most recently young people studying at Oxford and Cambridge.
Different ages. Different ambitions. Different transitions.
Yet underneath them, I kept seeing the same human capability.
TODAY, I HAVE A NAME FOR IT.
Transition Capability.
The enduring capability to repeatedly see, create and shape possibilities across a changing life.
That idea now sits at the heart of the Institute of Life Systems Design — bringing together strands of work that, for much of my life, appeared separate but increasingly feel like parts of the same question: how do we help people realise more of what they are capable of becoming and creating?
What Are You Not Seeing? is my invitation for you to begin exploring that question for yourself.