For centuries, it was widely accepted that the world was flat.

This was not some uninformed or ignorant belief. It was one reinforced by intuitive observation, authority, and repetition. The horizon appeared straight, the ground felt level, and experience helped to confirm this narrative. The belief, therefore, made sense within the context.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and a comfortable vantage point, and history has a tendency of judging these moments harshly. From where we stand (or sit) now, it seems mildly baffling that the idea of a spherical Earth was not more widely accepted, particularly when Greek philosophers such as Aristotle had argued for it more than two millennia ago.

Yet, if we are slightly more compassionate, it becomes easier to see how the prevailing view felt reasonable at the time. It aligned with lived experience and was grounded in the evidence available in everyday life.

Turning back to a business context, markets work much in the same way.

Businesses, organisations and institutions build their confidence based on experience. They observe patterns, capture data, repeat successes and refine understanding, and over time, what once began as an informed, logical interpretation settles into a simple, accepted truth.

That is all good and well, but once a belief becomes truth, it is rarely re-examined. That is when it starts to be defended.

When we think we know our market
Market knowledge within an organisation is typically built on direct observation, customer conversations, industry participation, and lived experience. No one sets out to misunderstand their own market, yet the difficulty for organisations begins when a working understanding settles into certainty.

The market is assumed to be a certain size. Growth potential is quietly capped. Adjacent opportunities are labelled as niche, unrealistic, small, or “not really our space”. Assumptions about customer priorities and buying behaviour rarely, therefore, feel speculative. Rather, they feel informed. Of course, they are based on data, and are often grounded in once accurate evidence, such as a total addressable market that was calculated years ago.

Much as scientific understanding and scope are regularly challenged to help innovate novel materials and techniques, markets themselves evolve and challenge what we know. Customer priorities shift, adjacent problems emerge, and new entrants re-frame categories.

When we start mistaking familiarity for understanding, we run the risk not merely of being wrong, but of operating on yesterday’s interpretation of today’s market, and of missing growth that sits just beyond our existing definition.

The assumptions we (not so) quietly defend
The longer an organisation operates within a market, the more its understanding of that market becomes intertwined with its own success. The prevailing wind of how the market “works” becomes validated by the results of revenue generated, customers kept, and competitors outmanoeuvred. It is this very validation that makes revision challenging.

Why? Because questioning the size of the opportunity subtly feels like questioning the previous growth on which success was built. Reframing the customer’s priorities can unsettle established product and brand positioning, creating an uncomfortable sense of internal contradiction, while exploring adjacent markets can appear to dilute focus rather than expand it.

It is important to remember that markets do not remain aligned to our internal models simply because those models worked at some point in the past. Definitions naturally shift, while problems evolve and what customers value changes. Sometimes this can be gradual, at other times, rather sudden.

That is how emerging competitors new to the scene can make such headway. Because they are viewing the market with fresh eyes and with an eager curiosity, attention and determination that may no longer be the modus operandi of established incumbent players.

If new entrants are reframing or possibly even redefining the landscape, the relevant question to ask is not what they are doing differently. It is, rather, whether our own definition of the market is stagnating and has remained static.

A simple place to start are these three questions to get you going and to help challenge your own view of your market understanding:

Where might our past success be limiting how we define today’s opportunity?

If a new entrant defined this market today, what might they see or address that we do not?

Which belief about our customers would we struggle most to let go of?

The discipline of curiosity
When it comes to understanding our own markets, there is rarely a simple right or wrong. The greatest risk is not a miscalculation, but rather complacency.

Success builds confidence. Confidence builds conviction. And conviction, left unexamined, can quietly harden into (at times arrogant) certainty.

The main point here is not to abandon experience or start to second-guess every decision that needs to be made. Far from it. It is, however, to resist the assumption that past understanding guarantees present relevance.

Remember that markets evolve, customers adapt, and applications expand and contract as surely as the tides. Organisations that succeed are not those that know their market perfectly, but those that continue to approach their activities with the same curiosity and drive that helped forge the early successes that led them down the path they are on now.

Rewards are reaped from those who keep learning rather than those who believe they have already learned enough.

The real risk, therefore, is not in being wrong about your market, but rather of being too certain that you are right.