What Your Best Thinking Is Defending

On the morning of September 11, 2001, call volume in New York surged to thirteen times normal and the cell networks collapsed. Millions of people couldn't reach their families. The exception was anyone holding a BlackBerry because it ran on its own data network, separate from the cellular grid. Government agencies took note. Within a few years the federal government relied on the device so heavily that when a lawsuit threatened to shut it down, the Justice and Defense Departments went to court to keep it running. When President Obama reached the White House, he wouldn't surrender his BlackBerry, even over the objections of his own security agencies. It was that beloved. A device for bankers had become something else. It became infrastructure.

Revenue climbed more than sixty percent in a single year. Subscribers went from one million to fourteen million in four years.

That kind of growth rested on a single belief. A phone was a serious instrument for serious people — built for security, reliability, and a keyboard fast enough for real work. Wall Street believed it. Washington believed it, and seventy-seven percent of federal managers carried one. The market believed it too. By 2009, BlackBerry held more than half of all smartphones sold in America, and Fortune named it the fastest-growing company in the world. A belief this widely shared stops looking like a belief at all. It looks like reality.

I loved mine. I have fond memories of dashing between meetings in New York, tapping out emails with one hand. I believed it too.

You already know how the story ends. That's the part hindsight hides. BlackBerry was right for a very long time.

On January 9, 2007, BlackBerry's co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, was on his treadmill when the report came through that Steve Jobs had unveiled the iPhone. A former engineer, he understood what he was seeing. Apple had put a full web browser on a phone, a data load the networks had always refused to carry. Somehow Apple had gotten one to say yes. In a business where the carrier controlled the device, the software, and the customer, Apple had demanded the reverse, plus a cut of every monthly bill. Verizon walked away. AT&T took the deal. The next day Lazaridis pulled his co-CEO in front of a screen to watch the announcement. "These guys are really, really good," he said. "This is different." McNish and Silcoff report the scene in Losing the Signal, their account of the company's rise and fall.

His co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, felt confident, as he had every reason to be. "It's OK, we'll be fine."

Larry Conlee, the company's chief operating officer, studied the device and saw exactly what was wrong. The iPhone wasn't secure, not by the standard that had made BlackBerry the government's phone. Its battery drained fast, and its glass keyboard was miserable. The mobile web was a market BlackBerry never wanted. By every measure the company used to judge a phone, the iPhone came up short. They weren't wrong. These were the most knowledgeable people in the industry, and they read the flaws with clear eyes. What they missed was bigger. Apple had not built a better phone. Apple was not a phone company. It came from computers and music, five years into the iPod, and carried its own idea of a handheld. Apple was asking what a phone could be. BlackBerry had stopped asking.

It wasn't a lack of intelligence. They were certain, and that certainty was the work of their own imagination.

The same imagination that had pictured wireless before the world caught up was now locked into what BlackBerry already knew. It ran through every reason the iPhone would fail, brilliant work pointed the wrong way. No one asked what a phone was becoming. They were too busy defending a success the whole market had proven right.

Same engine, different direction. Generative imagination, the mode that pictures what doesn't exist yet, had shut down, and Protective imagination, the mode that scans for threats and guards what already works, took over. Under pressure, a brain defaults to defense.

This Is the Default Script

The Default Script is the definition of success an organization optimizes toward and never examines. The definition doesn't have to be succeeding. It only has to go unquestioned. When the script is proven, it sinks so deep into how the organization allocates capital, sets targets, and promotes that it stops reading as a strategy and starts reading as the way things are. It doesn't take a collapse like BlackBerry's. Most scripts are smaller and harder to see, running at the level of a team, a leadership group, the customer experience, or the whole organization. It isn't a bad plan. BlackBerry's was a spectacular plan. That's what makes it dangerous.

A bad plan gets argued down. A proven one recruits the company's best thinking to its own defense, and that defense is strongest when the script is most correct. The pattern is measurable. When researchers tracked the airline and trucking industries through deregulation, they found that the more success a firm had behind it, the longer it held to its old strategy, and the more ground it lost. BlackBerry's was never more correct than in 2007. That was the most dangerous moment it would ever have, and it felt like the safest.

This is not the exception. Half of the S&P 500, the largest public companies in the country, will be replaced within a decade. The ones that fall are rarely the companies that were failing. They are the ones that were sure, running on what Innosight calls a confidence bubble, a readiness they assumed and never built.

You Don't Run BlackBerry

You are not running a company in freefall. Your numbers are strong, your team is deep, your board is largely aligned. That is where the script thrives. It does its most durable work inside organizations that are performing well, and something in the BlackBerry story is already familiar.

The oldest institutions carry the deepest scripts. A century-old company, a John Deere or a major bank, is not headed for BlackBerry's ending. Its script moves slower, setting the terms of what gets proposed, what gets funded, and what the market is allowed to look like, inside the company and beyond it. Questioning a script that has been right for a decade is hard. Questioning one that has been right for a century is close to heresy.

The strategic review keeps circling the same short list of options, every one reasonable, and nothing ever changes. The big innovation bet takes eighteen months and real money and returns almost nothing. The offsite produces a slate of initiatives any competitor could write. The board approves the AI investment in a single meeting and bolts it onto the existing business model, so the company only gets faster at the strategy it already has, right or wrong.

None of it looks like decline. Every meeting is sharp, the people are the best you have, and that is the tell. The work never gets worse. It stops reaching for what could be next, and from the inside that counts as a good year. In a bad year, it hides just as well, and the losses get blamed on execution, so the answer is always to run the old plan harder. Good year or bad, no one questions the premise. By the time you feel the cost, the market has shifted and the script has not.

The reason it can't be read from inside is structural, and it falls hardest on the person most equipped to lead. The executive who rose by mastering the model is the last vantage from which it can be seen. The organizational researcher Erik Dane calls this cognitive entrenchment. As expertise deepens, the patterns that produced it harden, and the expert loses the flexibility to see past them. To them the script doesn't feel like a script. It feels like knowing what works. The cost is personal before it is institutional. The leader most fluent in what already works spends their strongest years getting better at it as the ground shifts underneath them.

You can watch it happen when someone new walks in. They ask the questions an outsider still can, why the pricing is built the way it is, why that market never comes up, and the room answers, swiftly, that it knows what works by now. Listen to that answer. It’s more dangerous than “we've always done it this way”, because the older phrase at least admits it is describing a habit. This one believes it is describing the truth.

The script is not new. What is new is the speed. When MIT studied enterprise AI in 2025, it found ninety-five percent of corporate pilots returned no measurable impact to the bottom line. AI does not choose the target. The script does. Point it at a definition of success no one has examined, and the company reaches the wrong place faster.

The Script Is a Decision

Escaping it takes imagination, the one faculty the script claimed first. Even clear sight is not enough. Lazaridis saw the iPhone for what it was and said as much, and nothing changed. A script doesn't live in any one head. It lives in what the organization rewards, what it measures, what it waves off, and a mind rehearses what earns approval until it feels true.

It runs all the way up. A CEO reports against the plan the board approved, and the board grades the CEO against that same plan, so neither one has a reason to question a number that keeps coming in on target. The machinery built to protect the company ends up guarding the script.

The script keeps its power by passing for reality, and no one argues with reality. But look closer and it is something smaller. Someone made a decision, years ago, for reasons that held up at the time. A decision can be revisited. The organization doesn't have to move a single thing first. The seeing shifts, and then the script can.

Go back to the two moments. September 2001, when BlackBerry became the phone that held while everything else failed. January 2007, when the iPhone arrived and BlackBerry saw no threat. They were the same event. BlackBerry had defined the market it led, secure, reliable, built for people with serious work to do. That definition became the script, and every year the numbers came back and confirmed it. That was the trap. The engineers studied the iPhone closely and read it correctly against a script they had written themselves. Being right the first time is what they never thought to question. Balsillie said they would be fine, and by the terms of the script he was right. The script had been sound once. As the ground shifted, no one asked whether it still fit.

That's the question underneath the BlackBerry story, and it isn't how to avoid their fate. It's simpler, and it comes first. What is the thing your organization is most certain about. That's the thing you've stopped questioning. It was probably right once. So was BlackBerry's.

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The Default Script DiagnosticFive minutes. See where your organization's script has gone unquestioned.

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The Imagination AgeThe three modes of imagination and the disciplines for turning them back toward the right question.