If You Want to Understand Water, Don’t Ask a Fish

David Foster Wallace began his commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College by sharing a parable:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?'”

Some areas of life and business obviously require an outside perspective.

Governance is one. I’m currently in a “Board School” course with a dozen generational leaders who all know they need expert help to design and structure a board of directors.

Wealth management is another.

Tax strategy, estate planning, legal structure — these are all areas where even the most capable business leaders quickly recognize that expertise matters. They don’t do these things every day, and the stakes are high, so bringing in experienced advisors feels important.

But there are other forces shaping a company that are much harder to see: reputation capital, deep expertise, a carefully honed craft, an innovative culture.

These things are woven into the everyday fabric of the business — customer relationships, product decisions, hiring choices, the tone of leadership. They can be surprisingly difficult for leaders to step back and examine.

If you want to understand water, don’t ask a fish.

The reputation that built the business — and goes unexamined

Family businesses often have this same relationship with their reputation.

Over time, a pattern forms. Customers trust the company. Suppliers extend flexibility. Employees stay longer than expected. Communities feel a sense of loyalty to the brand. All of this accumulates until the business is wrapped in deeply earned trust.

But because that trust developed organically, leaders rarely stop to study it.

They know their customers. They know their products. They know how the business runs day to day. Yet the most valuable asset — the reputation that makes many of those relationships possible — often goes unexamined.

This becomes especially important during periods of change.

When a business is expanding into new markets, transitioning to the next generation, or adapting to a different competitive landscape, leaders are forced to make decisions that affect not only operations but also perception.

What parts of the legacy should remain unchanged?

Where does the company need to evolve?

What signals will customers interpret as continuity, and which ones might feel like a break from the past?

These questions are fundamentally about reputation, because reputation shapes whether customers experience change as a natural evolution or a departure from what they trusted. But they are difficult questions for insiders to answer on their own, precisely because they are so close to the water.

This is one reason experienced family businesses surround themselves with trusted advisors in other areas of the enterprise. Advisors bring distance. They see patterns that are hard to detect from inside the system.

The same is true for brand and reputation.

It makes sense to feel that no one understands your brand and reputation better than the family that built it. After all, you’ve spent years developing relationships, interacting with customers, and building a team.

But with that expertise comes the “curse of knowledge” — a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for experts to imagine what it is like not to know certain information. This causes the knower to incorrectly assume that others share their level of understanding.

The challenge is that reputation doesn’t live inside the company. It lives in the interpretations customers form when they encounter it from the outside.

You know your business too well. So well that it’s second nature. It’s “the way we do things.” You are immersed in it.

And sometimes the most valuable perspective comes from someone who can step outside the water long enough to help you see what others experience when they encounter your brand.

Because reputation always shapes the business’s future, even when no one is actively thinking about it.