Lens bias is the pattern I see most frequently in start-ups and organisations and the one which causes the most pain to growth.
The very first things I worked on out of university weren't games, or tech products. They were operas. Out of this, I pitched a film opera project to Channel 4, and miraculously it got financed. This led me into a project which was staffed one half by music people: composer, sound engineer, conductor and half by film people: director, DOP, editor.
Being the producer was like being quartered - the method of execution where horses get strapped to each of your limbs and all run in opposite directions at the same time. All of the arguments (and there were many arguments) boiled down to two statements: I think seeing / listening is the most important sense. Not even the art form! The embodied process of cognition. You can't argue with the way people sense the world.
Games are a fantastic training ground for interdisciplinary collaboration, and led to new and exciting versions of the horse experiment. Niantic is an example of a very successful company riven by lens bias. Half the company took a Silicon Valley view of
Translating that to deeptech, it turns out that creativity and lens bias are just as gloriously rife in pure engineering and research disciplines.
Why is it so hard to get scientists, engineers, customers and investors in the same room and make progress? The easy answer is communication - people talk past each other, use different jargon, have different priorities. The early 20th-century Russian theorist Alexander Bogdanov had a harder and more interesting answer. Every discipline, he argued, generates its own way of thinking through its own working practices. It's not just different vocabulary. It's a different ideological apparatus - a different set of basic assumptions about what's real, what counts as evidence, and what a solution even looks like. He called the science of this Tektology, and he wrote it in the 1910s.
My personal metaphor - lenses and optics - takes us back further, to Spinoza, who made his living as an optical craftsman after his excommunication.
"The ideas which we have of external bodies indicate the constitution of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies."
Spinoza spent his working life shaping glass to precise mathematical formulae to reveal things the naked eye couldn't see. He knew better than almost anyone that what you perceive depends on the instrument you're perceiving through. His philosophical insight is the same point turned inward: when an engineer looks at a problem, the idea they form tells you as much about how engineers are constituted - their training, their tools, their practices, their taste - as it does about the problem itself. We are each seeing through a lens that our labours have ground.
How does one overcome lens bias? Well, the first thing that it helps to be able to do is acknowledge that you have a lens. The next thing, is to be able to pull back far enough to peek around the edge of your lens. If you work for long enough and traverse different contexts and disciplines, you might be able to grind yourself more than one. And it's always possible - imperfectly - to borrow them from your collaborators.