The Exploration Blind Spot: When Organisations Can't See Beyond Their Core
- Frederic Etiemble
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
There’s an old joke about a man searching for his lost keys under a streetlamp. When asked if he’s sure he lost them there, he replies, "No, but this is where the light is!" This is an apt metaphor for how many organisations approach growth. They focus only on where they can see - their core business - while ignoring opportunities that lie just beyond.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore the often-overlooked barriers to sustainable growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation’s full potential.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organisations often find themselves tethered to their core operations; hesitant to venture into uncharted territories. This myopia, known as the Exploration Blind Spot, can stifle growth and leave companies vulnerable to disruption. To thrive, businesses must balance their focus on the efficiency of their existing operations with the pursuit of new opportunities.
The Exploration Blind Spot
This blind spot is often rooted in a mix of structural, cultural and psychological factors. Organisations frequently lack the tools, frameworks, and capabilities required to systematically test and de-risk new ideas, especially in environments where uncertainty is high.
Past experiences with failed innovation efforts - often due to poor methodology or unclear objectives - can breed scepticism in leaders, reinforcing a belief that “we tried that and it didn’t work.”
Meanwhile, executive incentives are typically tied to short-term performance, making it difficult to justify resource allocation toward initiatives that may not deliver measurable returns for several years. Layer onto this the pressures from investors who expect predictable quarterly performance, and you end up with a system that inadvertently punishes exploration. Even when promising ideas surface, they often don’t survive the scrutiny of ROI-focused business cases applied too early.
All of this contributes to a cultural and structural environment where exploration navigates between non-existence and a half-life where it is under-resourced, under-valued, and ultimately under-delivered.
The above-mentioned reasons make the Exploration blind spot a widespread one that can be easily identified through three common patterns:
Over-reliance on the core: Investing almost exclusively in the main business while neglecting opportunities in adjacent or new terrains.
Lack of exploration capacity: Absence of the structures, talent, or resources required to look beyond the current business model.
No structured way to test new ideas: Inability to systematically de-risk and validate new business ideas before scaling them.
The consequences can be severe. Without exploration, companies become overly dependent on existing revenue streams, making them vulnerable to market shifts and disruption. In contrast, resilient companies balance short-term operational efficiency with exploration of new growth opportunities beyond the core.
The Exploration Toolkit
There are many different ways to raise leaders’ awareness of the exploration blind spot.
In the article Innovation Inception: three ideas that unlock innovation in the minds of leaders I highlighted two frameworks - The Explore & Exploit Continuum and the Three Types of Innovation framework - that I find highly effective to create the necessary awareness and vocabulary to identify, discuss, and act on opportunities beyond the core business. And in The Invincible Company, which I co-authored with Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, and Alan Smith from Strategyzer, we developed a complete suite of tools for exploration of new business opportunities.
More recently, we’ve started using our Vibrance Growth Map as the eye-opener on the strategic need for exploration. The Growth Map is a strategy tool we use to help leaders systematically explore opportunities across nine distinct “terrains” by combining the dimensions of Where (“Core”, “Adjacent”, “New”) and How (“Build”, “Partner”, “Buy”).
Using the Growth Map helps leaders visualise the nine terrains where future growth could come from and realise how much of it depends on adjacent and new terrains. This awareness helps recalibrate resource allocation, maximising the chances of achieving long-term growth objectives.
It can be hard to imagine at first what ideas in adjacent and new areas could be, so we leverage AI as an ideation companion to help leaders overcome the white-page block. At Vibrance, we’ve even created our own Growth Map AI Agent, which can populate your Growth Map with ideas in each terrain as a starting point for growth ideation.
As we argue in The Invincible Company, having a healthy explore portfolio is the best way to create future growth and long-term resilience in an organisation, and the best protection against disruption when market dynamics change. Let’s examine now a case study that proves this point.
Case Study: Ping An’s Expansion Beyond Insurance
Ping An, originally a traditional financial services provider, recognised that relying solely on its core insurance and banking business would limit its long-term growth. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis exposed this vulnerability. Seeing both a threat and an opportunity, Ping An’s leadership understood that staying competitive required more than just optimising existing products; it required bold expansion into new growth areas.
Ping An’s Exploration Strategy
Technology as a Foundation for Expansion
In 2013, Ping An migrated 80% of its IT systems to the cloud, a move almost unheard of at the time.
This enabled AI-driven analytics, automation, and digital service offerings, laying the groundwork for new business models beyond finance.
Building an Ecosystem of New Businesses
Ping An incubated 11 new tech-driven businesses across Fintech and four new verticals, each with a distinct focus:
Fintech: OneConnect, a B2B fintech platform offering AI-driven risk management, digital lending, and blockchain solutions to banks and insurers.
Healthcare: Ping An Good Doctor, an AI-powered digital health platform providing online consultations, smart diagnostics, and medicine delivery.
Automotive: Autohome, an automotive ecosystem integrating car sales, financing, and AI-driven vehicle recommendations.
Real Estate: Smart property technology solutions, leveraging AI for real estate valuation, smart home integration, and digital mortgage services.
Smart Cities: AI-powered urban management systems that optimise traffic control, public security, and infrastructure efficiency.
These businesses leveraged Ping An’s technology, data, and financial expertise to create new revenue streams beyond insurance and banking, with cross-business synergies creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem.
Impact on Growth
Ping An’s transformation resulted in massive value creation. By expanding into adjacent and new areas, it diversified its revenue streams and increased resilience. Revenue grew from $20.35B in 2008 to $122.24B in 2024, when Ping An was ranked 53th in the Fortune Global 500 list of the most valuable companies in the world.
Conclusion
The Exploration Blind Spot is a common barrier to growth. Organisations that remain fixated on their core business risk being caught off-guard by technology disruption or rapid market shifts. To build long-term resilience, they must look beyond the comfort zone of existing business models.
Ideation with the Growth Map helps reframe the strategic conversation. It gives leaders a tangible way to explore adjacent and new opportunities, and a structured lens to rebalance investments across the full growth portfolio.
In a business era where disruption is a regular encounter and where fast-moving tech creates opportunities in unfamiliar terrains, the question isn’t whether you can afford to explore... it’s whether you can afford not to.
So, ask yourself: What’s the safest bet? Focusing all investments on the core business? Or also exploring a path through adjacent and new terrains toward the next growth wave?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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