Everyone saw it coming except you

The squirrel-meerkat principle for building peripheral vision

I follow around 50 Slack channels. Maybe more.

I refuse to get blindsided by the ground shifting underneath me while I’m heads-down on execution. That’s the reason, not boredom or a love of chatting all day.

Group channels. Project channels. My team’s work. Other teams’ public channels. Customer success feedback. Engineering issues. I skim through them, read quickly, mark as read, move on. I don’t interact with most messages. I jump in when I know the answer and the situation is time-critical. Otherwise, I’m just watching.

When I brought this up in a meeting with my peers, I assumed everyone was doing the same thing. It seemed obvious. How else would you see what’s coming?

Turns out, they’re not.

They focus on their teams. They keep their heads down in the trenches. When I asked why they don’t track what’s happening across the company, the answer was always the same: “I don’t have the bandwidth. I hate pings. I don’t want to see the unread messages bubble. It irritates me.“

There’s more than just Slack. I listen, follow conversations, ask questions. I want to understand the bigger picture of what’s going on at the company: not every minute detail, but if information doesn’t come to me, I’ll go get it.

The first time this got me thinking was when I got feedback from my peers:

“You’re all over the place.”

I do my work just fine. But things are interconnected and I want to notice what’s happening around me.

“You can’t be everywhere.”

I don’t want to be everywhere. I’m in many places because information doesn’t always come looking for me.

“Why do you want to be at every meeting?”

Not every meeting. Just the ones where decisions affect me or my team.

“Why do you need to know what other teams are doing?”

Because we’re in a system. Things are never as simple as they seem at first sight.

“Why are you so curious?”

Why aren’t you?

I couldn’t understand why they were asking me that. Still can’t.

How can you not be interested in what other teams are doing? What they do affects us. What we do affects them.

I learned the hard way: making changes that ripple through three teams requires seeing those teams first. Ignorance isn’t a strategy, even when it’s unintentional.

Some leaders operate like they’ll receive a weekly well-written memo with everything they need to know. Why go out there and waste time connecting with people, building relationships, listening?

What does this actually look like? A day or two after we introduce a change, communicate it in three channels, have everyone chatting about it for days, someone shows up and says, “I didn’t know this was happening. Why was I not informed/invited/included/etc?”

I’m always flabbergasted when this happens. How is that possible? How could you not see it? How could you not know?

Because you weren’t watching.

You’ll watch closed-door meetings happen two weeks before the reorg. You’ll notice the tone change in planning meetings before the priority shift. You’ll catch the project becoming problematic before it derails your sprint. You notice when signals shift.

A good leader is like a squirrel with a meerkat mindset: busy getting things done, but every few seconds they pause, look around, and think, “What’s shifting that could bite us later?” They’re not anxious. They’re attentive. The work keeps moving, and nothing jumps out of the bushes unannounced.

I’m calling this the squirrel-meerkat principle. Yes, I made that up. But you’ll remember it.

Not everyone does this. I’ve seen leaders miss all of it, be it the reorg, the priority shift, the project losing executive support. Then they wonder why their excellent work becomes irrelevant while they were building it. They stayed in their lane, heads down, all their time on execution. They missed the terrain that determines whether their execution even matters.

Great leaders don’t just optimize their own team, they understand how the system behaves.

Most problems don’t start where they explode. They travel across teams first.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s peripheral vision.

The tunnel vision tax

“Stay in your lane” is advice that works… right up until it takes you out. It’s usually well-intentioned, but it quietly installs blinders and calls it discipline.

You’re not responsible for driving everyone else’s car, but if you refuse to look left or right, don’t act shocked when something slams into you at full speed.

Situational awareness is part of ownership.

Don’t get me wrong. Deep expertise matters. Focused execution matters. But taken too far, narrow focus creates a special kind of professional blindness. Without understanding the terrain, even excellent work fails if it doesn’t connect to the system around it.

One step back changes everything. You stop seeing just your corner and start seeing the whole system with its connections and its dependencies. These are the forces that will derail your work if you’re not watching for them.

Situational awareness is full focus on quality work while staying aware that the world outside exists. Things don’t surprise you because you’re tracking the surroundings.

I didn’t always see this. I learned it in earlier roles where I was deep in operational work, organizing my team’s priorities while constantly trying to unblock others so work could move end to end. Over time, a pattern emerged: when things slowed down, it wasn’t because people weren’t executing. It was because no one was stepping back far enough to see how the system was actually behaving. Just don’t step too far back or you might end up in a different company. Or fall off a cliff.

That realization pushed me to be more intentional. I learned to take a deliberate step back: creating space to assess, recalibrate, and lead with context rather than reaction. I trained myself to listen and observe signals before they become obvious, let alone urgent. My natural curiosity helped. Put together, these habits changed how I approached leadership: not as staying in my lane, but as understanding the terrain well enough to navigate it without constant firefighting.

I still get sucked in. I still get involved in too many things. But now I’m aware of it. I know I can’t stay down in the trenches anymore. But I’ve also gotten much better at telling the difference between the problems I actually need to solve and the circuses that are simply very loud, very shiny, and absolutely not mine.

The invisible forces nobody puts on roadmaps

Your work doesn’t execute in a vacuum. It ships in an organization with competing priorities, political dynamics, resource constraints, and direction changes happening constantly.

Most of these forces are invisible until they hit you. They’re actually not invisible, everyone just pretends not to see them until it’s too late.

Money decides what survives regardless of what the plan says. Your project can be “strategic” and “high priority” while having zero people, no funding, and no one senior showing up to meetings. When the company actually allocates budget, the project with impressive slides but no resources dies first.

Leadership’s attention flows like water. It pools around fires, shiny new things, what keeps executives up at night, what competitors are doing. When attention moves, priorities follow. The project that mattered last quarter becomes the project nobody asks about this quarter. If you’re heads-down building and don’t notice the attention shifted, you’ll find out when you ship to silence.

There are a dozen other forces that don’t announce themselves. VPs who aren’t speaking to each other. Teams not being aligned because they’re measured on different things. The company changing direction and making yesterday’s critical work tomorrow’s irrelevant code.

These forces show up in small moments that cascade.

Imagine a product manager who wants to improve onboarding. The change is thoughtful, well-intentioned, and clearly makes sense from a product standpoint.

Now imagine that same flow quietly sits under marketing’s paid campaigns where budgets, attribution, and targeting all built on assumptions about how the system behaves. While the PM refines onboarding, marketing is planning campaigns in one channel, engineering is preparing the rollout in another, and everyone is doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.

No one is wrong. Nothing is broken. Until it is.

The issue only shows up because someone (you) happens to be paying attention across teams and notices the collision before it happens. The fix is simple: get together to discuss the changes and adaptations needed on both sides.

One conversation. Thirty minutes. Crisis prevented.

The lesson here? Good decisions made in isolation are how most avoidable problems are born.

If you don’t catch such things early, the system will still teach you, it just prefers to do so loudly, publicly, and on a very expensive day.

This happens constantly. Someone makes a change that seems isolated but ripples through three other teams. A product decision that breaks a customer success workflow. An infrastructure update that derails a marketing timeline. All preventable if someone was watching the connections.

If you’re the person preventing such problems, don’t expect a thank you note for a disaster that didn’t happen. Consider it your job and give yourself a pat on the back. You’re not psychic. You just built peripheral vision. And this is good. Now move on and keep your eyes wide open and your ears to the ground.

Building peripheral vision without becoming paranoid

You can’t track everything. Trying to will make you useless at your actual work. You’ll hit a breaking point and realize you need to sample the signals: pick the channels that matter and focus on those.

You can build a lightweight system for the handful of signals that predict whether your work survives or becomes irrelevant.

This isn’t about attending every meeting or reading every email or Slack message. It’s about identifying specific patterns worth watching and checking them regularly enough to avoid expensive surprises.

The minimum viable tracking system

People worth watching. Not everyone. Just the 3-5 people whose presence, absence, tone, or questions signal shifts in the company.

Your boss’s boss. People with influence over your work. The senior person backing your project (if one exists). The person on another team you depend on.

Track them lightly. Do they still attend your project meetings? Did their questions change from “how do we ship this?” to “how much does this cost?” Did they stop responding in Slack?

Presence and absence tell you where attention is flowing. Tone and questions tell you what leadership is optimizing for. When either shifts, your project’s position just changed.

Budget signals. Money is truth. Hiring freezes, approval delays, cost-focused questions in planning meetings. These signals precede direction changes by weeks or months. If your project lacks actual budget, actual people, or senior leaders showing up, it’s not actually a priority no matter what the plan says.

Roadmaps can promise anything. It’s the budget and behaviors that matter.

Meeting patterns and language shifts. When leaders have unusual closed-door sessions, announcements follow within a couple weeks. When fewer people show up to your project meetings, momentum is dying. When leadership stops saying “customer impact” and starts saying “cost optimization,” priorities just changed. The words change before the decisions get announced.

The weekly scanning habit

This doesn’t require hours, just some discipline.

Fifteen to twenty minutes, once a day or every other day. Scan leadership updates. Check plan changes. Notice who got promoted, hired, or moved. Monitor the channels across teams where tension surfaces before it becomes official conflict.

Not obsessively. Just enough to spot when patterns change.

Sometimes it takes longer. You find something that needs deeper investigation. That’s fine. The habit matters more than the exact time. This is operational awareness.

If you build this habit you’ll be rarely surprised.

What this looks like in practice

Managing the noise

I organize the 50+ channels into two categories: critical ones and scan-only. I check all of them at least once or twice a day. Not more. The critical ones get more attention. The rest get skimmed.

I learned to live with unread notifications. They don’t bother me anymore because I know they can wait. Not all pings are created equal. Some channels need close attention. Others can wait a few hours.

One of the leaders said he won’t join more channels because unread messages annoy him. He needs to read them. The pings distract him. So he stays out.

I get it. Unread badges are stressful. So is getting blindsided by a reorg, but at least that’s only once.

In the (physical) office, I rarely wear headphones. Headphones put you in your own bubble. You can’t hear what’s going on around you. I learned to work in different environments with noise, to zone in on work but not completely. Just enough to focus while still picking up the things I need to notice. I hear when someone’s stuck. I catch when someone’s about to make a decision without full context. I notice tension forming before it becomes a problem.

I schedule my deep work early in the morning and try to let other people have their own focus time too. Another suitable slot is in the afternoon when pings are less likely. I leave the majority of my calendar flexible because this is my work: unblocking people, providing information, connecting dots, coordinating across teams.

Some days I hate meetings especially if they’re back to back. Other days I know exactly why I’m there. When time is being wasted, I’m the first to suggest ending early. When discussions sidetrack, I have no problem saying “Let’s get back on track.”

Not all meetings are created equal. We’re constantly experimenting with format, length, who needs to be there. We course-correct. The key is that people need to speak up when meetings go off track, whether they’re the organizer or just a participant.

Making the connections

In meetings, I listen and make notes. I don’t zone out. If I’m in a meeting, I make the best of it because people sharing information is one channel, Slack channels are another, and random chatter in the kitchen or at lunch is another. All of these help you understand what’s happening in the company. The key is to be present regardless of where you are or what channel you’re tuned into.

I’ve connected people who needed to talk to make better decisions or prevent something from going wrong. An engineer who didn’t have the full picture and would have caused problems downstream. A product manager who didn’t know marketing was running a campaign that their feature change would break. A team lead about to commit resources to a project that was quietly losing executive support.

Without this information, without this context, it’s easy to make wrong assumptions and in the end make bad decisions.

Giving energy to these channels is the price I pay for seeing what’s happening across the organization so I can make better decisions when I need to.

I’ve finally reached a place where people around me understand this. I don’t get the “you’re all over the place” feedback anymore. They actually like having someone who connects the dots, sees across teams, and flags what needs flagging.

Turns out “I told you so” is most persuasive when you never actually say it.

But I have to be careful not to swing to the other extreme: where I hear everything so they don’t have to. That’s not sustainable. And it’s not the point.

Acting on what you see

Seeing the signals doesn’t help if you don’t act on them.

You can be the most educated person in the room and still watch the ship sail toward the wrong destination.

Spot a project losing momentum? Ask directly. “I noticed the VP stopped attending our check-ins. Is this still a priority?” Either you find out it’s still important, or you find out it’s dying and you can pivot before wasting three more months.

Money getting tight? Talk about your work in terms of what keeps leadership up at night. If they’re worried about cost, explain how your work saves money. If they’re worried about speed, explain how it gets things done faster. Your work hasn’t changed. Your pitch has.

See misalignment forming? Escalate early. You can’t fix structural misalignment from an IC or middle-management position. But you can surface it early enough for someone with authority to address it before everyone wastes months building the wrong thing.

Intuition says something’s off? Investigate. Your pattern recognition runs subconsciously before conscious awareness catches up. Stop and check. Most of the time, your intuition caught a real shift before your conscious mind connected the dots.

If you see the problem but don’t act, you’re choosing to watch the train wreck happen… knowing you could have prevented it.

The payoff

I started tracking signals years ago. The bigger the company, the more signals to follow. Made mistakes, adjusted the system, found what works. The usual.

Now I’m rarely caught off guard. There are some false positives when I see something that might become a problem but doesn’t. But the situations where I point something out to the people involved, where I suggest they talk, are way more frequent than the false alarms.

I don’t get the “you’re all over the place” feedback anymore. I’ve seen more leaders understanding that paying attention across teams is as important as doing quality work where your expertise is deeply needed. I’ve seen them listening more, connecting more, bridging gaps, talking to people, pointing things out. That’s a small win.

Sometimes I feel like a proud parent looking at them thinking, “Look at how quickly they’re learning.” Maybe I’ve spared them a lesson or two they would have learned the hard way.

Organizational changes are inevitable. Priority shifts. Strategic pivots. They happen no matter what you do. The only question is whether you’ll see them early enough to do something about it.

You can be the one who shows up two days after the change asking, “I didn’t know this was happening,” while everyone else has moved on.

Or you can build peripheral vision and situational awareness now.