This is what makes the plateau-maintenance mechanism so self-sustaining: the cognitive rigidity that prevents the entrepreneur from seeing the need to change approach also prevents them from recognising the rigidity. The Einstellung effect, the confirmation bias, and the hedgehog’s single explanatory framework are all experienced from the inside as accurate perception of a complex market — not as filters that are directing attention away from the information that would indicate the framework has become inadequate.

The Einstellung mechanism: when the answer blocks the better answer

Bilalić, McLeod and Gobet’s (2008; 2010) Einstellung research established the specific perceptual mechanism through which the successful approach becomes the perceptual obstacle to the better approach. The Einstellung effect is the automatic activation of the first adequate solution the expert schema can generate — and the consequent blocking of perception of superior alternatives that require different schemas to perceive.

At a growth plateau, the Einstellung mechanism operates with particular force because the successful approach has been repeatedly confirmed by the company’s history. The schema is not merely well-developed; it is validated, reinforced, and associated with the identity investments of everything the entrepreneur has built. The alternatives that would require different schemas are not merely unfamiliar — they are processed through the success schema and found inadequate, because they do not match the patterns that the schema recognises as correct.

The most insidious feature of the Einstellung mechanism at plateau is its self-confirming quality. The entrepreneur who is looking for evidence that their approach needs to change is not finding it — not because the evidence does not exist but because the Einstellung mechanism is directing their attention toward the evidence that confirms adequacy and away from the evidence that would challenge it. The plateau feels like a temporary obstacle because the success schema is generating the perception of temporary obstacle from the incoming data, regardless of what the data would reveal through a different framework.

Confirmation bias and the success filter

The Wason (1968) and Baron (1998) confirmation bias research establishes the information processing mechanism that sustains the Einstellung effect. Confirmation bias is the tendency to selectively seek, weight, and recall information that confirms existing beliefs — and it is activated most powerfully when the self-concept is most invested in the belief being confirmed.

After years of success with a specific strategy, the entrepreneur’s self-concept investment in the strategy is at its maximum. The confirmation bias is therefore also at its maximum: the successful strategy is the reference frame through which new information is evaluated. Information that fits the framework feels confirmatory and important; information that contradicts it feels like noise, exceptional, or incorrectly framed. The plateau entrepreneur is not ignoring disconfirmatory evidence through deliberate bias; they are processing it through a framework that categorises it as irrelevant or incorrect before conscious evaluation occurs.

The practical expression of this is the plateau explanation. The entrepreneur who explains the plateau through temporary factors — macroeconomic headwinds, competitive noise, execution issues — rather than through structural factors is demonstrating confirmation bias: the temporary explanation preserves the adequacy of the underlying approach, while the structural explanation would require acknowledging that the approach has reached its limits. Both explanations may be partially accurate; the confirmation bias mechanism systematically weights the one that protects the success framework.

The hedgehog’s single explanatory framework

Tetlock’s (2005) forecasting research established that experts organised around a single powerful explanatory idea — hedgehogs — produce substantially worse predictions than experts who draw on multiple frameworks — foxes. The hedgehog’s single idea is more intellectually coherent and more confidently held, and it has been confirmed by past success in a way that makes it feel more reliable; but its single-framework structure is precisely what limits its predictive accuracy when conditions change beyond the framework’s domain of accuracy.

The entrepreneur who succeeded through a single powerful insight — a specific market understanding, a technology application, a customer psychology model — has developed the hedgehog structure through the success. The framework was accurate when it produced the success. The plateau occurs when the market, technology, or customer has evolved beyond the framework’s explanatory power, but the hedgehog continues to interpret everything through it — because the framework is the cognitive structure through which all information is being processed, not an external model that could be evaluated against alternatives.

The Levitt and March (1988) competency trap formalises the structural consequence: success increases competence in the successful activity and reduces exploration of alternatives, because the resource investment that confirms and develops the successful approach is consistently the most immediately rewarding allocation. The competency trap and the Einstellung effect together produce the plateau: the successful approach becomes the most developed cognitive option, makes all alternatives seem less sophisticated, and prevents the exploration that would develop the alternative schemas needed to perceive new growth directions.

Books worth reading on this

Range by David Epstein is the most directly applicable available account of why breadth of framework across multiple domains is the specific cognitive antidote to the Einstellung mechanism and the hedgehog structure — and why the entrepreneurs most likely to navigate past success-induced plateaus are those who have developed multiple explanatory frameworks rather than deep expertise in a single one. For the entrepreneur who wants the most intellectually grounded available challenge to their own success framework, Epstein’s account of how the most adaptable thinkers use diverse analogies and frameworks to see past their current schemas provides the most practically useful available complement to the plateau maintenance mechanisms this article describes.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Bilalić, M., McLeod, P. & Gobet, F. (2008), Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones: The Mechanism of the Pernicious Einstellung (Set) Effect, Cognition, 108(3), 652–661. Bilalić, M., McLeod, P. & Gobet, F. (2010), The Mechanism of the Einstellung (Set) Effect: A Pervasive Source of Cognitive Bias, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(2), 111–115. Wason, P.C. (1968), Reasoning about a Rule, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20(3), 273–281. Tetlock, P.E. (2005), Expert Political Judgment, Princeton University Press. Levitt, B. & March, J.G. (1988), Organisational Learning, Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 319–340. Epstein, D. (2019), Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, Riverhead Books. Schulz, K. (2010), Being Wrong, Ecco Press.