Identifying and communicating what matters. Your role has broader scope, which means that you’re able to see across a wider variety of work and spot patterns that your reports might miss.

Having one person who is explicitly keeping an eye on a particular future event increases the likelihood that whatever knowledge is in the organization has somewhere to go and will be seen holistically. And remember to incorporate feedback from people who may not be sitting in the executive suite. Go back to the periphery for information and insights about these events.

Deeply understanding the situations customers are in, the jobs they are trying to get done in those situations, and the outcomes they are seeking is vital to anticipating how those situations might change.

In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.

Empowering individuals to take action broadens the amount of experimentation an organization can undertake, increasing its odds of seeing the early warnings of an inflection point in a timely way.