The Lesson I Almost Missed
When I first watched the “Monkey Business Illusion” video during one of our design thinking sessions in the Tekedia Mini MBA, I thought I knew exactly what I was supposed to see. The instruction was simple: count how many times the basketball is passed. I focused so hard on the ball, determined not to miss a count. When the video ended, the faculty asked a simple question: “Did you see the gorilla?”
I froze. A gorilla? What gorilla?
Like many others, I had been so locked into one task that I completely missed a person in a gorilla suit walking right through the scene. It was humbling and a little funny, but the real impact came from the lesson behind it. That moment wasn’t just about a clever experiment, it was about innovation practices. It showed me how easy it is for businesses, even entire industries, to miss obvious opportunities or threats because they are focused on something else.
As I sat reflecting, I couldn’t help but connect it to my journey at Wise Breed Analytics (WBA Limited). Building AnalyticsHQ, Wise Breed Academy, and WorkShift OS often requires balancing intense focus with broad awareness. That gorilla reminded me that attention is a scarce resource, and smart innovation practices are about learning how to manage it.
In this post, I’ll break down how the Monkey Business Illusion connects to design thinking and what it teaches us about smarter innovation practices. I’ll share real-world business examples of companies that missed their “gorillas,” show how design thinking can help us avoid the same blind spots, and offer practical steps you can start applying in your work, startup, or career.
Why the Monkey Business Illusion Matters for Business
The Monkey Business Illusion reveals an uncomfortable truth: attention is finite and selective. In business, that shows up as:
- obsession with a single KPI while customers quietly churn for other reasons
- morning standups that emphasize throughput while product discovery fails
- long product roadmaps that miss a competitor quietly changing the underlying market
Researchers have shown that inattentional blindness is robust across many contexts and even affects experts when they are focused on a demanding task. That means expertise alone does not immunize teams from blind spots.
Design thinking offers a set of practices that intentionally widen attention. It is explicitly non-linear and human-centered. It asks teams to empathize with users, define the right problem, ideate widely, prototype quickly, and test with real people. These steps reduce the chance that something crucial goes unnoticed.
Where Businesses Commonly Miss the Gorilla
I’ve taken time to examine three real cases that illustrate the cost of narrow focus and the upside of seeing the gorilla.
Kodak
Kodad is the company that invented the problem it ignored.
Kodak actually invented a working digital camera in the 1970s. Yet the company remained fixated on film and the profitable business around it. While Kodak paid attention to film sales and short-term margins, it missed the broader shift in customer behavior and the new business model that digital cameras enabled. The result was catastrophic: Kodak surrendered enormous market value and had to re-invent itself. This is a cautionary tale about focusing on current business units instead of the changing experience customers will soon prefer.
One key practical lesson Kodak’s story taught me is: when your core business is still healthy, deliberately allocate time and resources to explore what customers might want five years from now. Use design thinking sprints to test those future scenarios rather than assuming the present will persist.
Netflix and Blockbuster
The story of Netflix vs. Blockbuster is a fascinating case study that highlights the “The Monkey Business Illusion”. One saw the gorilla and one did not.
Blockbuster was fixated on expanding physical stores and maximizing revenue from late fees. That focus blinded them to a growing shift in customer behavior: people wanted convenience, choice, and eventually on-demand access to movies from the comfort of their homes.
Netflix, on the other hand, noticed the “gorilla” in the room. They saw that the real opportunity was not in more stores or late fees, but in reshaping the customer experience. First, they disrupted the DVD rental model with mail delivery, then doubled down on streaming technology, and eventually pioneered personalized recommendations powered by data.
The results speak for themselves. Netflix pivoted, scaled, and became a global leader in entertainment. Blockbuster, despite once dominating the industry, missed the signal until it was too late.
The lesson for businesses is clear: in a rapidly changing environment, it is not enough to simply focus harder on what already works. Leaders must constantly ask, what signals might we be ignoring? What shifts in customer needs or technology are we overlooking while doubling down on old models?
Missing those signals can mean being left behind, no matter how strong your current market position may be.
Nokia
Nokia once dominated mobile handsets. The company had engineering talent and global scale, yet it underestimated how software, app ecosystems, and user experience would change the market after the iPhone’s arrival. Nokia’s attention remained on hardware and short-term channel economics while the smartphone platform shift grew outside of its focal area. The result was a rapid decline in market share once software-first competitors scaled.
Key takeaway: set up “peripheral vision” teams that track adjacent markets and non-obvious signals. In design thinking language, this is scouting during empathy research and mapping weak signals during the define stage (more on that shortly).
How Design Thinking Avoids the Blindness
Design thinking is most effective when you adopt practical habits that reduce inattention. Here, I’ve mapped the Monkey Business insight into each design thinking stage with real, executable techniques that will help you get result.
Empathize
The goal of this phase in design thinking is to widen attention to capture unexpected behavior of the stakeholders (the customers). You’re to expand who you observe and what you listen for.
Empathy is not a quick interview. It is about seeing the full context of how people behave.
From experience these tactics helps:
- Shadow users for longer sessions. Watching a customer for five hours instead of twenty minutes reveals the workarounds they invent.
- Log surprises. After every observation, ask the team: “What surprised you?” Collect these insights in a shared log.
- Listen to non-customers. Call center agents, delivery staff, or technicians often see friction points before customers even complain.
These habits keep your team from only noticing what they expected to find.
Define
Here, you must avoid narrow problem statements that hide bigger signals.
The way you frame the problem determines what you see.
- Map assumptions. Put every assumption on a board, and test the riskiest first.
- Reframe your challenge. Instead of asking, “How do we increase conversion?” ask, “What stops people from trusting us enough to try?”
- Include emotions. Add frustration, confusion, and joy to your journey maps. Emotions often point to the hidden signal.
A small change in how you phrase the problem can shift the entire direction of your solutions.
Ideate
You need to deliberately create space for ideas that sit outside the usual focus.
The thing is, innovation often lives at the edge of what feels irrelevant.
- Use quick sketching techniques like Crazy 8s to force variety.
- Bring in outsiders from unrelated teams or even customers. Their lack of bias makes blind spots visible.
The goal is not to find the perfect idea in one session but to expand the space of what you notice.
Prototype
The actual goal here is to test for discoverability, not only functionality. A prototype is not just about whether it works. It is about whether people notice what matters.
So, check whether users notice and understand what matters.
- Ask what they noticed. When testing a prototype, don’t just measure task completion. Ask users, “What stood out?”
- Measure attention. Use simple A/B tests or click heatmaps to check if new elements actually draw focus.
- Simulate before building. A Wizard of Oz test, where you manually simulate complex systems, lets you validate demand without heavy investment.
This helps you avoid investing in features that quietly go unseen.
Test
The final stage is where design and analytics meet. Use both qualitative and quantitative measures to find what you missed.
- Monitor for anomalies like unusual payment declines or search queries.
- Pair data signals with direct observation: when analytics shows a spike, watch the customers behind it.
- Run pre-mortems where the team imagines how the product could fail.
Data reveals where something is off, observation reveals why. Together, they surface blind spots before they become fatal.
Design thinking does not eliminate inattentional blindness, but it gives you a systematic way to reduce it. When practiced consistently, it trains your organization to notice the gorilla early.
Practical Examples in Action
Design thinking is not just theory. Teams that adopt it can surface the hidden issues that others miss. IDEO’s work across industries shows how deep empathy and rapid prototyping reveal new product and service models. Major firms like PepsiCo and Ford have embedded design thinking into strategy to avoid strategic blind spots and to build products that match real user needs.
In Africa, mobile money platforms provide an instructive contrast. M-PESA scaled because it did not only build a technology. It built distribution, agent liquidity, and customer trust through iterative learning and local adaptations. Those are design-driven moves: observe, iterate, and adjust systems to the user environment. The academic evidence shows M-PESA’s adoption created meaningful economic effects by improving access and reducing transaction friction.
Final thought
The Monkey Business Illusion is not a single lesson you watch and forget. It is a reminder to build processes that broaden attention. Design thinking gives you the structure. Analytics gives you the scale. Leadership must make both habitual.
