Perceptual Complexity: Seeing Strategy from Different Mountains
Why strategy depends on how we see, not just what we know
I was walking around one of the lakes in the Dolomites when I noticed something quietly instructive. With every few steps along the path, the landscape shifted. The peaks that had seemed like one solid ridge unfolded into several layers. Valleys appeared where moments earlier there had been only shadow. What looked fixed from one vantage point changed shape entirely from another.
The mountains hadn’t moved. I had.
That simple observation captures one of the most overlooked realities of strategic work: the world changes as we move through it, and our understanding changes with our perspective. Strategy is not just an analytical problem. It is a perceptual one.
The hidden layer of complexity
When we talk about complexity, we often locate it “out there” — in markets, regulations, technologies, or geopolitics. But a great deal of complexity resides “in here,” in the way people perceive, interpret, and describe the world around them.
Every leader, team, and function sees the organisation through a different lens. Each view is shaped by role, experience, and emotional state. What looks like inefficiency to one person may look like resilience to another. What one group calls risk, another calls opportunity.
Language gives the illusion of shared understanding. We use the same words, strategy, alignment, and performance, as if they mean the same thing to everyone. They rarely do. Our words carry histories and assumptions that remain unspoken. Two people can agree on the sentence yet mean entirely different things.
This is perceptual complexity: the multiplicity of perspectives that coexist within any organisation. It is both a strength and a source of friction.
The illusion of alignment
Most strategy processes underestimate how much meaning is lost in translation. Workshops and documents create a temporary sense of alignment, but it is often an alignment of language, not of understanding.
When people leave the room, they act on their own interpretation of what was agreed. Differences in experience, personality, and stress distort the message. The same decision can appear urgent, optional, or irrelevant depending on where someone stands.
These gaps are not just communication failures. They are expressions of how people orient themselves within the system. Each person’s orientation, what they notice, prioritise, and interpret as important, is shaped by the pressures they face. The technical manager under delivery stress, the finance lead managing risk exposure, the director balancing politics and reputation: all inhabit the same organisation but experience different worlds.
In this environment, perfect alignment is an illusion. The goal is not identical perception but enough shared orientation to act coherently.
Divergence and convergence
Diversity of perception is not a flaw to fix; it is the raw material of strategy. Divergent views reveal the shape of the landscape. They make visible what any single perspective would miss. Divergence exposes blind spots, surfaces tensions, and expands possibilities.
But divergence without convergence creates fragmentation. If everyone acts on their own mental map, coherence disintegrates. Yet if leaders suppress differences in pursuit of a tidy consensus, the organisation becomes brittle and unable to adapt.
The art of strategic leadership lies in holding both. Divergence of thought, convergence of action.
Divergence allows learning; convergence enables coordination. It is not a one-time balance but a constant negotiation. Strategy lives in that tension — between seeing differently and moving together.
The darkness principle
However hard we try, there will always be darkness. There will always be things we cannot see or understand, perspectives we cannot access, and assumptions we do not know we hold.
No matter how much data we collect, no one ever has a complete view. Each perspective is partial, shaped by where we stand. This is not a failure of analysis but a property of complex systems. Every insight is gained at the cost of another we miss.
Perceptual complexity teaches humility. It reminds us that strategy is not the search for perfect knowledge but the practice of acting with incomplete information.
The darkness principle does not mean we stop trying to see. It means we accept that seeing is always selective, and that our task is to act wisely within the shadows.
The human filter
Even when information is available, it passes through human filters. Emotion, fatigue, fear, and personality shape what we notice. Stress narrows perception; curiosity expands it. Culture also selects which interpretations are reinforced or suppressed.
This is why two people can look at the same dashboard or dataset and reach opposite conclusions. Data does not remove perceptual complexity; it often amplifies it. The problem is not the absence of information but the diversity of meaning we assign to it.
Most of this operates implicitly. Strategy conversations often fail not because people disagree on facts, but because they hold different unspoken frames of reference. They talk past each other without realising it.
Building shared orientation
If complete alignment is impossible, what can we do? The task is to build shared orientation, not uniformity of thought, but a common sense of direction.
Shared orientation emerges through dialogue, not decree. It requires creating spaces where different perspectives can be expressed, tested, and translated. The goal is not to eliminate differences but to make them explicit enough to work with.
In practice, this means asking:
What does this challenge look like from where you stand?
What assumptions are we each holding?
Where do our views diverge, and what do those divergences tell us?
Clarity in language is critical. When people use the same words, they must know what they mean and what they do not. Strategy work becomes a process of meaning-making as much as decision-making.
Seeing and moving
Walking around that lake in the Dolomites, I realised that each perspective revealed something tru
