The Ketchup Bottle Problem
Why organizations struggle to see what’s right in front of them
Have you ever opened the refrigerator looking for the ketchup and not been able to find it? You stare directly at the shelf where it should be. Move things around. Look again.
Nothing.
Then someone walks over, points to the bottle sitting inches from your face, and suddenly it’s obvious.
There it is.
What’s interesting isn’t that the ketchup was hidden. It wasn’t. Your brain filtered it out. We’ve all done it — looking for our keys while holding them, searching for our glasses while they’re sitting on top of our head, reading the same sentence three times and still missing the typo.
The brain is constantly filtering. It has to; there’s simply too much to notice everything. Most of the time that filtering serves us. Occasionally it hides something that’s been in front of us the whole time.
It makes me wonder whether organizations have their own version of the ketchup bottle problem.
We’ve spent decades trying to get transformation right — methodologies, governance structures, operating models, reporting processes, maturity assessments, certifications, entire industries built to help organizations change. And yet transformation remains one of the most frustrating challenges organizations face.
That raises an uncomfortable question. What if the problem isn’t that we haven’t looked hard enough? What if there’s something sitting right in front of us that we still haven’t learned to see?
Here’s the idea I keep coming back to. The most important things organizations miss are rarely hidden. They’re sitting in plain sight, held in place by assumptions so familiar we’ve stopped noticing them. We don’t fail for lack of information. We fail because our assumptions quietly decide what counts as information in the first place.
The default approach
Most transformation work begins with an assumption so familiar we rarely question it: that transformation is fundamentally an execution challenge. Define the future state. Build the roadmap. Establish milestones. Execute the plan. The better we execute, the more likely we are to succeed.
It sounds reasonable — until we remember the world doesn’t stand still while we’re executing. Markets change. Technologies evolve. Leaders leave. Customer expectations shift. A roadmap that was perfectly reasonable when it was drawn can drift out of step with reality while we’re still following it.
And yet we often keep measuring success by how closely we followed the original plan. At some point, discipline stops keeping us on course and starts keeping us from noticing the course has changed.
The climbing-a-mountain approach
Standing at the base, you choose the best route you can see. Halfway up, something becomes visible that was impossible to see from below. A washed-out trail. A safer path. A hidden valley. A better destination.
Was the climb wasted? Of course not. The climb created the information — it only became available because you climbed. Progress and learning weren’t separate activities. They were the same activity.
So why do so many organizations still treat them as separate — learning first, execution after? Reality is messier than that. In a changing environment, progress creates information, information changes decisions, and decisions change the path. Adaptation isn’t a deviation from the plan. It’s often evidence that we’re paying attention.
Why pointing isn’t enough
Come back to the ketchup bottle for a moment. In the refrigerator, the bottle is passive — the moment someone points, the spell breaks, and it stays broken. Organizational blindness doesn’t work that way.
What an organization fails to see isn’t sitting quietly on a shelf. It’s being held in place — by every process, every incentive, every reporting line, every quiet assumption about how things are done here. So when someone names the obvious problem, the organization can nod, agree, and carry on exactly as before. The insight didn’t fail because it was wrong. It failed because the thing it described was held in place by too many hands to move with a single sentence.
Which is why seeing was never the hard part. Sustaining sight — against a system built to restore the old view — is.
The Transformation Office approach
Today, many organizations are creating Transformation Offices. The interesting question isn’t whether that’s a good idea. It’s what problem those offices are being asked to solve.
If transformation is primarily an execution challenge, then reporting, governance, and oversight make perfect sense. If it’s fundamentally an adaptation challenge, then something else is needed — and it’s harder than pointing. The greatest value isn’t tracking what happened, or even helping leaders see what they currently cannot. It’s helping the organization keep seeing: holding a clearer view in place long enough that it doesn’t quietly reassemble into the old one.
In other words, helping the organization avoid its own ketchup bottle problem — not once, but for as long as it matters.
We’ve all had the experience of staring directly at something and not seeing it until someone pointed it out. None of us can name our own ketchup bottle — that’s the whole problem. So the better question is: who in your world is positioned to see what you can’t? And are you actually listening to them?