How to see around corners

Some people seem to see it coming. You start describing a problem and they finish it for you, three moves ahead of where you are. It reads like wisdom, or magic, or twenty years of scar tissue. Some of that. But mostly it’s a skill, and a skill comes apart into pieces you can name.

What it’s actually made of

Experience is the piece everyone credits, and it’s the least interesting one. It hands you a library, and a library doesn’t help much the first time something genuinely new walks in.

The piece that does the real work is seeing the connections. Who feeds whom, which decision quietly sets three others in motion. Most people only ever look at the link right in front of them.

Then there’s weighting, the one people miss. Misjudge the size of an effect and you either freeze over something tiny or wave through the massive thing that costs you a year.

And then you have to call it. The people who can’t see around corners are often the ones who see the whole system perfectly and never move, because they’re still modeling it. Modeling on steroids is still standing still.

The corner I saw and couldn’t turn

A travel company I worked with put someone in charge of sales whose real background was RevOps. Good operator, wrong seat. The way they approached selling was going to set off a cascade of waste downstream, and it was obvious. Not because I’m clever. Game the process forward one step at a time, weighting each effect, and you could see exactly where it broke and roughly what it would cost.

I said so. I worked to get an experienced sales lead in alongside them, on an advisory basis. It went nowhere. Dead on arrival. And the cascade played out more or less the way the map said it would.

The harder half

Here’s the part that isn’t flattering. Seeing around the corner is the learnable half, and I do believe it can be taught. The harder half is getting the room to act on what you saw before the cost lands. A read nobody will act on is just an expensive way to be right.

Which is most of why I now start from the outside. With no stake in the org chart, the corner and the authority to turn it can finally sit in the same person.