In 1938, Chester Carlson performed a small miracle in his makeshift laboratory above a bar in 37th Street Queens, New York. The patent attorney and part-time inventor pressed a glass slide covered with sulfur against a zinc plate, rubbed it with a handkerchief to create static electricity, exposed it to bright light, and dusted it with powder. When he peeled away the slide, there it was: 10-22-38 ASTORIA, the world's first electrophotography image.
Carlson had just invented the photocopier.
What happened next should terrify every corporate strategist.
Over the following seven years, Carlson approached twenty major corporations with his invention. General Electric, IBM, RCA, Eastman Kodak; the titans of American industry, companies that prided themselves on innovation. Every single one rejected him. IBM's response was particularly revealing: after exhaustive analysis, they concluded that even if the technology worked perfectly, the total worldwide market for copying machines might reach, at most, 5000 units.
It wasn't until 1946 that a small photo-paper company called Haloid (later Xerox) took a desperate gamble on Carlson's invention. By 1959, they released the 914 copier. Within two years, Xerox's revenues jumped from $30 million to $500 million. The machine IBM said nobody would want was being leased at rates that generated more revenue per unit than IBM's computers.
The Pattern Hidden in Plain Sight
Carlson's story isn't unique. It's the norm. And once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. This is the paradox that keeps me up at night:
the very expertise that companies pay millions to cultivate becomes the antibody that rejects the future.
And it happens with such predictable regularity that you'd think we'd have learned by now. But we haven't. Because the problem isn't in our spreadsheets or our strategies. It's in our skulls.
Inside the Expert's Prison
Let me take you inside the mind of those IBM executives who rejected Carlson. I've reconstructed their thinking from historical accounts, and it's disturbingly rational: "Who needs copies?" they asked. "Important documents are typed in triplicate with carbon paper. Unimportant documents don't need copying. The technology is solving a problem that doesn't exist." They surveyed offices. They counted carbon paper usage. They interviewed secretaries. Every data point confirmed their hypothesis: the copying market was minuscule.
What they couldn't see, what their expertise made invisible, was that they were measuring the wrong thing. They were counting how many copies people made when copying was difficult, not imagining how many they'd make when copying was easy. They were like ice merchants calculating the market for refrigeration by counting ice deliveries.
And let me bring back some of my philosophical training. Thomas Kuhn, in his masterpiece The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, called this "paradigm blindness."
Once you're inside a paradigm, you literally cannot see what lies outside it. The paradigm doesn't just influence what you think; it determines what you're capable of thinking.
This is where the philosophical challenge of unlearning becomes most acute. Kuhn showed us that scientific progress isn't just about accumulating new knowledge, it requires the wholesale abandonment of entire conceptual frameworks. The shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics wasn't simply adding new facts to old theories; it demanded a fundamental reconceptualization of space, time, and causality itself.
The Neuroscience of "No"
Neuroscientists studying innovation resistance have found that when experts encounter ideas that challenge their fundamental assumptions, their brains literally respond as if under physical threat.
Using fMRI scanning, researchers found that the anterior cingulate cortex—the brain's error detection system—lights up when we encounter information that contradicts our expertise. The same region that evolved to alert us to physical danger now fires when someone suggests our professional knowledge might be obsolete.
This isn't a bug in human cognition. It's a feature. Our ancestors who constantly questioned their assumptions about which berries were poisonous didn't survive long enough to reproduce. The brain that kept us alive on the savanna now keeps us from seeing the future in the boardroom.
The more expertise we accumulate, the stronger these neural pathways become. This is a concept known as neuroplasticity.
The more a person learns and practices a skill or body of knowledge, the more robust and efficient those neural pathways become.
Leon Festinger's research on cognitive dissonance shows that we don't just resist contradictory information, we actively reinterpret reality to protect our existing beliefs. Experts don't just miss disruption; they explain it away.
The Outsider's Advantage
So if expertise is the enemy, who are the heroes? History has a disturbing answer: amateurs, outsiders, and desperate gamblers.
Malcolm McLean wasn't in the shipping industry when he invented container shipping in 1956. He was a trucking magnate frustrated by how long it took to load and unload ships. The entire shipping industry couldn't imagine just putting the whole truck box on the boat. McLean's "ignorance" revolutionized global trade and made globalization possible.
Reed Hastings wasn't in the entertainment industry when he founded Netflix. He was a software engineer annoyed by a $40 late fee from Blockbuster. While Blockbuster executives leveraged their deep retail expertise to perfect store locations and inventory management, Hastings was asking a different question: "Why do we need stores at all?"
The pattern is almost comical in its consistency. The people who transform industries are almost never the people who understand them best. They're the people who understand them least but who understand something else that suddenly, violently, matters more.
Breaking the Expert's Curse
After studying hundreds of disruptions, I've noticed something curious about the companies that successfully navigate them. They don't try to make their experts more innovative. They create conditions where expertise can't kill the future.
Amazon's Day 1 Mentality: Jeff Bezos's letter to shareholders in 1997 introduced the concept of Day 1: maintaining the mindset of a company's first day regardless of size or success. "Day 2 is stasis," he wrote. "Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death." What Bezos understood was that expertise accumulates like sediment. The only way to prevent it from hardening into dogma is to constantly declare bankruptcy on what you know.
Google's 20% Heresy: Google's famous 20% time isn't about time management. It's about creating a space where the company's own expertise can't reach. Gmail, Google News, AdSense, most of Google's successful products came from engineers working outside their expertise, on projects their managers thought were worthless.
The Unlearning Advantage
So I leave you with this: What would you attempt if you didn't know it was impossible?
It's not a hypothetical question. Right now, in your industry, someone who doesn't know what's impossible is attempting it. They don't have your expertise, your experience, or your wisdom. That's precisely why they're going to succeed.
The only question is whether you'll have the courage to forget what you know in time to see what they see.
Chester Carlson died in 1968, wealthy beyond imagination from the invention every expert said nobody wanted. In one of his last interviews, he was asked what advice he'd give to inventors. His answer was telling:
"Don't try to find experts to tell you whether your idea is good. Find people naive enough to not know it's impossible."
The future doesn't belong to the smartest people in the room. It belongs to the ones brave enough to admit they might be wrong about everything.