Fresh Eyes

23 Dec, 2025

The advantage of walking into a business isn’t seeing what others miss. It’s not being clouded by your own problem of the moment.

Everyone has their problem

Walk into any business and ask senior leaders what’s keeping them up at night. You’ll get different answers.

Sales is worried about pipeline. Product is worried about technical debt. Operations is worried about delivery. Finance is worried about cash. Each person sees their piece clearly. Each problem is real.

The challenge is that everyone is clouded by their particular problem of the moment. They’ve been living with it. It shapes what they notice, what they prioritise, what they think the business needs.

Fresh eyes don’t have a problem of the moment. You haven’t been living with anything. You get to see the whole board whilst everyone else is focused on their square.

This isn’t about being smarter. It’s about not being clouded yet.

Absorb before you judge

The instinct when you arrive is to diagnose. Find what’s broken, fix it, show value quickly.

Resist this.

The first job is absorption. Talk to people. Gather what already exists — reports, dashboards, documents, tools. Most businesses have more artefacts than anyone remembers. Someone built a customer health dashboard two years ago and it’s still updating. There’s a weekly sales report that goes to six people. A strategy deck from the last offsite sits in a shared drive.

These artefacts reveal what the business thinks matters. Or thought mattered. Or wanted to matter. Read them without judgment.

The temptation is to arrive with frameworks, to slot what you see into categories, to start forming a thesis immediately. The discipline is to stay in absorption mode longer than feels comfortable.

You’re not there to create new insights. You’re there to synthesise what’s already scattered across the business.

Establish rhythm

Absorption gives you a snapshot. Rhythm gives you a picture that moves.

Get a light-touch cadence going quickly. A Monday meeting to understand priorities for the week. A Friday update to see what actually happened. Nothing heavy — just enough to see what people are working on, what’s slipping, what’s getting attention.

This does two things.

First, it shows you where activity is flowing. Not what the org chart says, not what the strategy deck claims — what people are actually doing day to day.

Second, it establishes your presence without being disruptive. You’re in the slipstream of the business. You see the current without creating waves.

The rhythm reveals patterns. Who consistently delivers. Who consistently explains why they couldn’t. Which problems get airtime. Which get ignored. What the team thinks is urgent versus what actually is.

Overlay financials with activity

Now look at the P&L.

Start with the obvious: where’s revenue? Where’s cost? What’s growing, what’s flat, what’s declining? Trace back from any concern. Revenue stalling — what sits behind it? New business, renewals, expansion? Cost problem — what’s in those lines? Can you get to the detail?

Most operators can build a reasonable picture of financial health within a few weeks. The numbers don’t lie, even when the narrative around them does.

Then overlay what you’ve learned about activity.

The financial problem is often in a different place than where the team is focused. The P&L says growth has stalled. The senior team is consumed by an operational restructure. The numbers say gross margin is eroding. Everyone’s talking about the new product roadmap.

This gap — between what the financials say and what people are doing — is the diagnostic signal. It reveals where the business is misaligned.

Synthesise, don’t reveal

Here’s the humbling part: you’re rarely discovering something the business doesn’t know.

Someone in sales knows pipeline is weak. Someone in finance knows margins are slipping. Someone in operations knows the process is broken. The information exists. It’s just scattered, unconnected, not synthesised into a picture anyone is acting on.

Fresh eyes don’t reveal hidden truths. They connect things that are already visible but not yet joined up. You’re not smarter than the people who’ve been there for years. You just have the advantage of seeing all their problems at once, without being attached to any of them.

The job is to crystallise. To take what everyone knows individually and make it collectively visible. To name the constraint that everyone senses but hasn’t articulated.

Align without minimising

Once you see the shape, the instinct is to redirect everyone. Here’s the real problem, here’s where we need to focus, let’s go.

This can work. It can also create resistance.

The problems people are working on are real. The sales leader worrying about pipeline isn’t wrong — pipeline matters. The ops leader worrying about delivery isn’t wrong — delivery matters. Their problems aren’t imaginary just because they’re not the binding constraint.

The skill is pointing everyone in a similar direction without minimising what they’re carrying. Acknowledge the problems. Connect them to the larger picture. Show how solving the constraint creates space to address what they’re worried about.

Chesterton’s fence applies throughout. Before you tear something out, understand why it’s there. The thing that looks stupid often has context you don’t see yet. The process that seems pointless is protecting against something that burned them before. The ridiculous and the sublime sit close together.

Approach with humility. Build the mental model. Then start to focus.

The advantage

Fresh eyes are temporary. Within a few months, you’ll have your own problem of the moment. You’ll be clouded like everyone else.

The window is short. Use it to absorb without judgment, establish rhythm, overlay financials with activity, and synthesise what’s scattered.

You’re not there to be smarter than the people who built the thing. You’re there to see the whole board while you still can.

#prediction