How to see around corners

Some people seem to see it coming. You start describing a problem and they finish it for you, and the answer is already three moves ahead of where you are. It reads like wisdom, or luck, or twenty years of scar tissue. Some of that. But mostly it's a skill, and it has parts.

What it's actually made of

Experience is the first part, and the least interesting. It hands you a library. A library doesn't help much the first time a genuinely new thing walks in.

The second part is seeing systems. Not the org chart. The connections. Who feeds whom, which decision quietly sets three others in motion, where a change over here surfaces as a cost over there. A business is a chain of these, and most people only ever look at the link right in front of them.

The third part is weighting, and this is the one people miss. The impact of one thing on another is almost never absolute. It's proportional, and the proportions swing wildly. Misjudge the size and you either freeze over something tiny or wave through something that's about to cost you a year. Reading the size matters more than spotting the connection.

The last part is discipline. You decide when you have enough to call it, not when you have everything. The people who can't see around corners are often the ones who see the whole system perfectly and then never move, because they're still modelling it. Timebox the read. Enough is enough.

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. Because if you gamed the process forward one step at a time, weighting each effect, 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. 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.