A board meeting. The CEO asks the question that has been hanging in the air for a quarter:
“Why isn’t this line growing?”
“It’s the price,” says the sales director. “The chains squeezed the margin. The product stopped paying off in negotiations.”
“I don’t think so,” the head of marketing cuts in. “The messaging is fine. The problem is distribution.”
Someone from trade shakes their head. “It’s the shelf. The competition bought up the best facings, we’re left with the rest.”
Someone from production adds, half under their breath, more to themselves than to the rest of the table: “This product could have been changed two years ago. Nobody asked.”
Silence. Several answers, several convictions, a grain of truth in each.
The board’s natural reflex? Pick one, usually the one from the person with the most authority in the room, and base the decision on it. Or, when there’s no agreement, commission outside research to “settle it.”
Both moves can be a mistake. These answers don’t compete in a way where one is true and the rest are false. They are fragments of a single whole that nobody has assembled yet. The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. The problem is the flow of information in the company, which loses it along the way.
Every department knows something the others don’t
The trouble at this meeting isn’t that people disagree. It’s that each of them is talking about something different, even though they all believe they’re talking about the same product.
Sales and the key account managers know the reaction. They alone hear what the buyer really says when they set your product aside, the sentence that comes right after “no, thank you.” That sentence never reaches a report, because a sales report shows the result, not the reason.
Marketing and trade know the promise. They know why a given message was created and what promise it was meant to carry, but they also see the shelf as it really is, not as it looks on the planogram. They also own the in-store display, so they know which assumptions of the product’s narrative break against the reality of the store.
Production and R&D know the potential. They know what the product can do that nobody communicates. They know its limits, but also its reserves, the things that could be changed faster and more cheaply than the rest of the company assumes.
Different departments, entirely different kinds of knowledge. No report connects these perspectives, because each is created separately, in a different department, in a different language, under different KPIs. This is the essence of silos between departments: not bad will, not a lack of competence, just several lenses pointed at the same object whose images never overlap. The flow of information in the company works beautifully horizontally, within a team, and breaks vertically, when knowledge has to pass from one department to another.
There’s one more thing that deepens this: most of that knowledge is written down nowhere. A significant share of an organization’s knowledge is estimated to be tacit, meaning it sits in people’s heads, in their experience and intuition, rather than in documents or systems. What a company knows about its own product largely does not exist in a form you could open and read. It exists only in people. And it leaves with them, when they move on, when they change departments, or simply when nobody asks.
What a blind spot costs
A blind spot doesn’t hurt right away. The bill comes later, and it’s rare for anyone to connect it to the fact that knowledge simply got stuck.
An example: a yogurt line has been losing share for three quarters. The board commissions consumer research. The result points to the packaging, so a costly redesign and campaign begin. The effect: the decline slows for a moment, then returns.
And here’s what the research didn’t show. For six months your key account manager has been hearing more or less the same thing from a buyer at one of the chains:
“Your product looks more expensive next to the competition. They went with a bigger pack in the same price tier. On your side it stands out.”
The KAM knows this precisely. They mentioned it once, at a sales meeting:
“The buyer brought up the pack size again. Maybe it’s worth checking?”
But it wasn’t their call, so the topic drifted away. And somewhere in production, someone nobody asked could add:
“Increasing the pack size on this line? That’s simpler and cheaper than you think.”
Except nobody outside production knows that, because nobody asked the question.
The knowledge that solved the problem was in the company the whole time. Split across two people in two departments that don’t talk to each other about pack size. The research answered honestly the question it was given, only that question was about the packaging, not about pack size against a specific competitor on a specific shelf. Nobody asked that second question, even though the answer to it was sitting inside.
This is what a blind spot costs: the company pays twice. Once for knowledge bought externally, though a more accurate version was sitting inside. And again for the quarters in which the product kept losing share, though it could have been stopped.
Where blind spots actually form
Here’s the thing that changes how you look: blind spots don’t form inside departments. Within the sales team, knowledge is dense, because people talk to each other every day and trade what they heard in the field. The same goes for marketing or R&D. The gaps form at the seams, where one department’s responsibility ends and another’s begins, and where nobody owns the whole.
The sales-marketing. The salesperson knows a given message doesn’t work on the buyer, they heard it with their own ears. Marketing knows why that message was created and what it was meant to achieve. Both sides hold half the picture. The conversation that would join them usually doesn’t happen, because each is measured against something different and has different goals.
The marketing-production. The trade team sees that the pack format is losing on the shelf, that it’s too big for the store’s display or gets lost next to the competition. Production often knows that the format can be changed at a lower cost than everyone assumes. These two pieces of information never meet, because the departments have no reason to talk to each other about the shelf.
The field-board. This is the widest gap. Knowledge is densest at the bottom, among the people who stand next to the customer every day. The decision is made at the top. Between the two are several layers of structure, and at each one the signal weakens a little, gets smoothed over a little, becomes a little more “no point bothering the board with a detail.” At the very top all that’s left of it is a rounded number without context.
The problem isn’t confined to one company or one industry. This is simply what an organization that has grown looks like: the more layers and departments, the more seams where knowledge can get stuck.
Before you ask the market, ask yourself
When a product’s sales fall, a large company’s first reflex is almost always the same: let’s commission research. A consumer panel, a packaging test, a category analysis. It’s a reasonable and necessary step. The only question is whether you’re asking a second, equally important one alongside it.
Research with customers will answer the question of what the consumer would do. It won’t answer the question of what your own organization already knows about why the product isn’t growing, because that knowledge isn’t on the market. It’s with your KAM, who came back from a meeting with a buyer yesterday. With the trade person who visited twenty stores this month. In the head of someone in production who has known for a long time what to do differently. The best decisions get made when one is laid over the other: the picture from the market and the picture from inside the organization.
Before you spend the budget on learning something from outside, check how much you already know inside. Not at a joint meeting, where a cautious consensus will emerge and the strongest voice in the room will win, but in a way that draws each department’s real fragment out. That usually turns out to be faster, cheaper, and closer to the heart of the matter than anyone expected.
The answers that came up at the start don’t have to compete. Put together, they give a picture that no department sees on its own.
And if you want to find out where the blind spots are in your company, we have something for you. We’ve built a method and a tool that anonymously gathers and analyzes the knowledge scattered between departments . We’re just starting a pilot for a handful of companies on special terms. See the details.
