What does your inner circle keep you from seeing?
The strength that builds your team can be the same one that narrows what you see.
This is the third of four articles in the series, Understanding Your Strategic Lens, exploring how the lens every CEO leads through shapes not just how they solve problems, but which problems they even recognize. Read article 1 here.
THINK ON IT: What does your inner circle keep you from seeing?
Consider this: How you think about a decision is as important as the decision itself.
Each of us carries a default lens we use to evaluate a decision. That lens quietly shapes what we notice, what we trust, and what we dismiss.
The goal of this series on Understanding Your Strategic Lens is to surface the lens you may not know you’re wearing. So far, we’ve examined the Visionary Lens which prefers problems that are big enough to matter and the Operator Lens which prefers problems that have a clear path to a solution. Today, we’ll look at what may be the most comfortable lens to wear: the Loyalist Lens. Because it gives special weight to the perspectives of trusted insiders, it’s also the lens your team is most likely to reinforce without anyone realizing it.
I saw this in action when I worked at supercomputing pioneer Cray Research. The leadership team had brought in Eugene Brooks, who led the Massively Parallel Computing Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to make a provocative claim: that massively parallel microprocessors would soon pose a serious competitive threat to Cray’s custom-built supercomputer silicon.
His presentation, "The Attack of the Killer Micro," didn’t land well. We were from the midwest. He was from the Bay Area. In the early 1990s technology world, the cultural distance between those two places was enormous.
Discounted as someone who simply didn’t understand the deep engineering complexity of supercomputer technology, he was openly ridiculed by a room full of brilliant people who knew exactly how hard it was to build the fastest computers in the world. An outsider from a government research lab talking about commodity chips wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know.
As it turned out, he knew exactly what he was talking about. The killer micro wasn’t a distant threat. It was already in motion. And yet the room full of brilliant people couldn’t see it; not because they lacked intelligence, but because of who was delivering the message, who was in the room to evaluate it, and how that room was wired to reach a conclusion.
That’s the Loyalist lens. And it operates through three reinforcing biases. What makes the Loyalist lens so insidious is that it shapes both what the room is willing to hear and what the room eventually decides.
Availability bias shapes what information feels most true or important. The Loyalist leader's picture of the business is heavily influenced by whatever problems, stories, or perspectives are most recent, vivid, or emotionally memorable. Inside strong cultures, certain narratives get repeated so often they begin to feel self-evidently true. Meanwhile, quieter signals and slower-moving risks receive far less attention, regardless of their actual significance.
In-group bias determines whose voice shapes the problem definition. It’s the who before the what. Insiders carry credibility. Outsiders carry the burden of proof. That imbalance distorts the problem definition long before the discussion begins. My Cray colleagues didn't dismiss Brooks carelessly. They dismissed him confidently, armed with genuine knowledge of why microprocessors faced real engineering obstacles: memory latency, I/O constraints, the complexity of delivering sustained high performance computing. That confidence was the problem. The very expertise that made the objections credible made the underlying thesis invisible.
Groupthink bias determines what conclusion the room reaches, corrupting the output. In a cohesive, high-trust team — exactly the kind the Loyalist leader builds — the social cost of dissent is high. Disagreement feels like disloyalty. I felt it that day. I kept my mouth shut, a silent party to the consensus of louder voices. The result is a room that reaches consensus not because the evidence demands it, but because the culture does.
Together, these three biases create a blind spot that masquerades as leadership done right: a trusted team, a cohesive culture, a room full of people who believe in each other. Until the outsider is right. Until the killer micro walks in the door.
That’s the question worth sitting with: what does your inner circle keep you from seeing?
Check out the Act on It section below where I share a practical Loyalist lens-check and a set of questions you can put in the hands of someone you trust to pressure test your thinking before your next important decision. (Premium Members only. Not a member yet? Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to over 100 tools and how-tos for implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel J. Boorstin
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