Binoculars vs. Eyes

Why Scanning the Landscape Matters More Than Zooming In Too Soon

(I’ve just come back from my first two week vacation in 25 years; the first week was a safari (and yes, everyone was right when they told me to take one over the last 25 years…) - I got to thinking about the binoculars I took, and how rare it was to use them… (I’ll spare you my 2000 photos…))

Imagine standing on a hill at first light. A vast landscape rolls out in front of you - rolling fields, dark forests, distant hills, a river catching the early sun, a plume of smoke from a farmhouse chimney, maybe the flicker of movement in the trees. With your naked eyes, you take it all in. You notice patterns: the way the light shifts across the valley, the shape of clouds hinting at weather coming in from the west, a subtle change at the edge of your peripheral vision that might be a muntjac or a fox. Your field of view is enormous - roughly 120–180 degrees horizontally. Resolution isn’t perfect everywhere, but it’s good enough, fast enough, and wide enough to scan, orient, and spot what deserves a closer look. Your eyes are built for discovery. (Well, your eyes - mine would miss everything further than 10 feet away…)

Now you lift a pair of binoculars. Suddenly that distant farmhouse leaps into razor-sharp focus. You can count the roof tiles, see the John Deere parked beside it, read the expression on the farmer’s face. The detail is astonishing. But the rest of the world vanishes. Your field of view collapses to perhaps 5–10 degrees. Everything else - the river, the treeline, the weather front, the movement you had just noticed - is gone, blacked out by the narrow tubes. To get any value from the binoculars at all, you first had to decide exactly where to point them. You had to rule out 99% of the landscape to inspect that 1% in high resolution.

This is not just optics. It is a near-perfect metaphor for how we observe, think, decide, and innovate - especially in pharmaceutical strategy, R&D, and market positioning. In my “Seeing Further” series on here I have written about the value of looking beyond the obvious horizon. But there is a crucial nuance worth exploring here: seeing further is not always about sharper focus on a single distant point. Sometimes the real advantage comes from seeing more things first, at a usable level of resolution, before you ever reach for the high-powered tools.

Human vision itself is designed this way. The fovea - the small central pit in the retina - delivers high-acuity colour vision (less than many animals/ insects, but good for a mammal), but it covers only about two degrees of arc (roughly the width of your thumbnail at arm’s length). The rest of the retina trades detail for breadth, motion detection, and change awareness. Evolution gave us excellent peripheral vision precisely because, in uncertain environments, knowing what to look at is often more valuable than knowing how to look at it once chosen. Binoculars (or telescopes, microscopes, dashboards, AI summaries, or focused due-diligence decks) amplify one dimension - resolution - at the direct expense of another: context and optionality. They force exclusion before exploration is complete.

In pharma and biotech this tension plays out constantly. The “eyes” mode is broad scanning: reading widely across indications, attending conferences without a rigid agenda, talking to clinicians and patients outside your core therapeutic area, reviewing old trial data that didn’t fit the prevailing narrative, noticing weak signals in adjacent fields. It is hypothesis generation, pattern recognition, and orientation. The “binoculars” mode is exploitation: deep mechanistic studies on a single target, competitive landscaping of three rival assets, detailed positioning work on one lead candidate, or granular market research on a narrow patient segment. Both are essential. The art - and the frequent failure point - is knowing when to switch and refusing to reach for the binoculars before the wide scan has earned you a direction worth magnifying.

Too many teams, companies, and even entire therapeutic areas default to binoculars too early. They stare “dead ahead” at the most crowded, most visible part of the landscape - the mechanism everyone else is chasing, the patient population with the biggest immediate revenue, the regulatory path that looks safest. They rule out the periphery before they have truly seen it. The result is incrementalism, crowded battlegrounds, and missed asymmetric opportunities.

One example that stays with me is the positioning of OCREVUS (ocrelizumab) - one of the best launches ever in our industry. When we supported our wonderful client to position this asset, we didn’t look dead ahead.

Around 2010–2015 the multiple sclerosis field was intensely focused on the obvious centre of the landscape. The dominant paradigm was T-cell-mediated inflammation in relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS). Multiple high-efficacy therapies were already approved or in late development, all competing fiercely on relapse rates, MRI lesions, and convenience. The binoculars were pointed squarely at that crowded patch. Many observers (and some companies) assumed that was the only game worth playing.

But a wider scan with the eyes revealed something different. Emerging data - some from off-label use of the earlier anti-CD20 molecule rituximab - hinted that B-cells might play a far more central role in MS pathology than the mainstream narrative suggested. At the same time, the scan picked up a much larger unmet need further out on the periphery: primary progressive MS (PPMS). No approved disease-modifying therapy existed for PPMS patients, who faced steady, relentless disability accumulation with almost no options. The landscape contained a quiet, high-consequence opportunity that the narrow view had largely ignored.

OCREVUS, a humanized anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody from Genentech/Roche, was developed and positioned not as another incremental player in the relapsing space, but as the first therapy capable of addressing both relapsing and primary progressive forms by targeting B-cells centrally across the MS spectrum. The positioning emphasized early high-efficacy use, slowing of disability progression (even in PPMS), and compelling MRI outcomes. It wasn’t about staring dead ahead at the conventional T-cell battlefield; it was about scanning the full immunological and clinical terrain first, spotting the broader unmet need, then applying focused development and commercial effort where it mattered most. The result was a true landscape-changer: approval in 2017 as the first and only therapy for both RMS and PPMS, rapid uptake, and blockbuster status that redefined what disease modification could mean in MS.

This wasn’t luck or a single brilliant insight. It was the disciplined outcome of sufficient wide-field scanning before the high-resolution work began. Had the team fixated only on the most visible, competitive slice of the market, the PPMS breakthrough and the B-cell repositioning might have been delayed or missed entirely.

We see the same pattern repeatedly. In oncology, companies that scan broadly across tumour biology and combination approaches sometimes uncover unexpected synergies that narrow “basket trial” thinking never reaches. In portfolio strategy, teams that insist on wide exploration across modalities (small molecules, antibodies, cell/gene therapies, even non-traditional platforms) surface asymmetric bets that the binoculars-only crowd dismisses as “off-strategy.” Conversely, organisations glued to the hot area of the moment - whatever the current vogue mechanism or patient population happens to be - frequently overpay, enter saturated spaces, or solve yesterday’s problem with tomorrow’s capital. We’re in the middle of the obesity focus still, despite being 5 years too late…

The risk is only growing. Modern tools - AI-driven literature summaries, real-time dashboards, competitive intelligence platforms - often function as super-binoculars. They deliver exquisite detail on whatever slice of data you already told them to watch, while making the wider landscape feel increasingly distant or irrelevant. The temptation to skip the eyes phase is stronger than ever.

So how do we get better at this?

First, protect deliberate wide-scanning time. Block time for unfocused exploration: reading outside your therapeutic area, attending sessions at conferences on topics you know nothing about, reviewing “failed” programs with fresh eyes, talking to people whose worldview differs from your own. Treat it as non-negotiable R&D.

Second, earn the right to zoom. Only reach for the high-resolution tools - deep target validation, detailed competitive war-gaming, granular positioning - after the broad scan has given you a defensible sense of direction. The best strategists I know keep asking: “Have we truly mapped the full landscape, or are we already pointing the binoculars at the first shiny object?”

Third, value and integrate cognitive diversity. Some people are natural wide scanners - intuitive, pattern-seeking, comfortable with ambiguity (this is me - zooming in hurts my brain). Others are natural zoomers - precise, analytical, relentless on detail. Neither is superior; both are incomplete. Organizations that design processes allowing scanners to inform where the zoomers point their effort create a genuine advantage. (I explored this in more depth in my earlier piece on cognitive diversity in “Seeing Further.”)

Fourth, in positioning and commercialisation specifically, resist the reflex to narrow immediately to competitive differentiation. Map the entire patient journey, the full scientific terrain, the adjacent unmet needs first. Only then decide which story is worth telling at high resolution. In reality, I have successfully positioned some of the biggest and best blockbusters over the past 30 years, but I probably lucked into it at first - this rational strategy (eyes, then binoculars) is just how I work, and it always passed the gut feel test for me…

The most powerful observers - whether individuals, project teams, or entire companies - master the fluid dance between eyes and binoculars. They use the wide view to see more possibilities than anyone else, then selective, disciplined high-resolution focus to turn the best of those possibilities into reality. In pharma’s asymmetric game of innovation, where the landscape is vast, the unknowns many, and the stakes enormous, seeing further almost always begins with seeing more broadly first.

The hill is still there. The landscape hasn’t changed. The only question is whether we lift the binoculars before we’ve earned the right to point them - or whether we trust our eyes long enough to discover what is actually worth looking at.