“Your perspective is always limited by how much you know. Expand your knowledge and you will transform your mind.” — Bruce Lipton
In 1873, the British amateur biologist Douglas Spalding noticed that young birds tended to follow the very first moving object they saw. It didn’t matter if that object was their mother or something else entirely. This behaviour seemed to be “stamped” into them at birth. A few decades later, in 1911, the German biologist Oscar Heinroth made similar observations, reinforcing the idea that early experiences could shape lasting patterns in animals.
In the 1930s, Heinroth’s student, Konrad Lorenz named this phenomenon imprinting(Prägung). Lorenz studied it in depth, showing that there was a brief but critical window just after hatching when a gosling would “choose” its guide. Once that choice was made, it was imprinted. Even if separated later, the gosling would continue to follow either its mother or Lorenz himself, depending on who it had first encountered.
Lorenz with his followers
Imprinting differs from ordinary learning. It doesn’t take repetition or reward; it happens almost instantly and is hard to rewire. Later research showed that imprinting influences more than just following behaviour. It can shape food preferences, mating choices, and responses to opportunities and threats. The strength of imprinting lies in speed and certainty, giving young animals an immediate survival rule. But that efficiency comes at a cost. Once set, the pattern resists change. A gift in stable conditions becomes a liability in uncertainty.
The same pattern applies to individuals and organizations. The initial patterns we adopt often become the ones we struggle to overcome. These patterns or theories we work with act as lenses, shaping our interpretation of opportunities and threats, and even whether we perceive them at all.
Organisational imprinting: the first map that rarely gets updated
“You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” — Albert Einstein
Organisations imprint too. The conditions early employees are born into — first customers, if capital was scarce or plentiful, the technology we used, the regulations we navigated, a founder’s personality and work styles. These inputs etch our “how we win” map into a firm’s routines and stories.
Over time, that first map imprints into an organisation’s policies, procedures, protocols, and precedents. This determines what we pay attention to, what we dismiss, how we frame opportunities, which anomalies we file under “noise”. Success intensifies the imprint. When a particular product, channel or pricing model works, we invest, refine, ritualise — and learn to not see anything that contradicts it. The competence becomes a competency trap. We get better and better at the thing that made us successful, and progressively worse at noticing when the territory changes.
Cognitive science has language for this. We navigate reality with schemas — mental frames that help us interpret and act quickly. As Eleanor Rosch showed, schemas compress complexity so we can function. But such compression comes at a cost:
“Only the information that is relevant and important to the currently activated schema will be encoded.” — Alba & Hasher
Once a “winning” schema is activated, we record and pay attention to less of what doesn’t fit our schemas. In markets undergoing structural change, that can be treacherous. Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower described the resulting blind spot in established organisations:
“This self-perpetuating force repeatedly caused established firms to conclude that disruptive technologies did not present a compelling investment opportunity.” — Bower & Christensen
While established firms dismissed disruptive technologies that did not fit their schema criteria, entrepreneurs with different schemas saw exactly the opposite. Take for example a common pattern in the disruption cascade, where an established organisation just can’t see the value in a new product that competes with its existing products, even when that product came from their very own R&D or some brave intrapreneur (Eric Yuan and Zoom in Cisco or Steve Sasson and the Digital Camera in Kodak.) Let’s take the disk drive industry as an example. Christensen and Bower investigated what happened when different types of technological changes occur. They looked at whether emerging or established companies would take the lead in developing these new opportunities.
The Disk-Drive Disruption Cascade
Success Pictures
“All things are subject to interpretation.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
In the disk drive industry (as in many others) incumbents didn’t miss the future for lack of engineers; but for lack of attention or perhaps a lack of schemas. Inside the leading drive makers, teams quietly built working prototypes of the next architecture years before the market asked for them.
What got funded were projects that made the dominant customers happier with the current game: bigger, faster, denser versions of what already sold. Small, ambiguous “toy” markets were filtered out by the firm’s schema and by its success metrics: order size, margin profile, channel cadence. As the psychology literature would predict, only the information relevant to the active schema was encoded — and therefore resourced.
In our series on “From Resource Allocation to Strategy”, the late Clay Christensen looked at companies like Control Data and Seagate. Inside the (then) leaders, engineers quietly built the future off-book. At Seagate (then dominant in 5.25″), teams produced 80+ working 3.5″ prototypes in 1985 before anyone sought formal approval. At Control Data (CDC) (dominant in 14″), engineers had working 8″ drives nearly two years before the market emerged.
Then the imprinting kicked in. Marketing and sales showed prototypes to current dominant customers (e.g., IBM for Seagate), who wanted capacity on the existing trajectory, not smaller drives for nascent uses. Forecasts shrank, margins looked thin, finance withdrew oxygen, and resources flowed to sustaining upgrades of the established architecture.
The frustrated engineers, who knew where the future lay left to found Conner, Micropolis, Shugart, Quantum. Like any budding entrepreneur, they sold wherever anyone would buy — mini-computers, early desktops, even laptops — and improved until they could move upmarket. Incumbents later dusted off their shelved designs to defend their imprinted base, but mostly cannibalised their own lines rather than leading the new category.
It is an eternal problem, successful incumbents can indeed build the next architecture; but their schema and resulting metrics wouldn’t resource it, if they can see it at all. Different lens, different signal, different outcome.
Newly minted founders see nascent markets as runways to the future, not cul-de-sacs of the past. To them, thin margins are lifelines and demanding customers are welcome.
Enter theory: The lens that changes what we see
Duck Rabbit Illusion
If schemas filter what gets noticed, theory shapes what gets explained and funded. That’s why good theory is so valuable in changing markets.
“The best way to make accurate sense of the present, and the best way to look into the future, is through the lens of theory… Theory helps to block out the noise and to amplify the signal.” — Scott D. Anthony & Clayton Christensen, Seeing What’s Next
“A good theory doesn’t change its mind… It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.” — Clayton M. Christensen
We rarely invest enough in expanding our repertoire of theories, yet that portfolio is what lets us see what others don’t.
In our latest episode of The Innovation Show, Clark Gilbert adds a timeless truth: changing lenses is toughest while the old model still works. Customers anchor resource allocation; capital markets reward legacy metrics like gross margin; there’s often no crisis in the old world at the very moment you must build the new. Hence the need for a Dual Transformation: keep the core tight, aligned and rewarded, while you build a separate context with its own metrics, money and mandate. Separation sounds simplistic, but it’s a practical answer to a complex problem: one world still pays the bills as the other is born.
Change the lens and you change what you notice, fund, and scale. What yesterday’s schema dismissed as trivial, the right theory reframes as essential.
To understand the power of theory, we are joined by Joseph L. Bower and Clark Gilbert for a conversation about how resource allocation becomes strategy — and how the right lens helps leaders see value their current map deletes.
https://medium.com/media/563edbb168f7afe18e403881d9f07029/href
The Power of Imprinting: And the Value of Changing Lens was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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