seeingaroundthecorners.com  ·  a Management Alchemy practice, in progress

Seeing Around the Corners

A practitioner capability — not a slogan.

There was no World Wide Web.

No search. No profiles to read, no talks to watch. No way to find the people building the future of an industry — except their books, and no way to learn from them directly except getting them into a room with you.

I was a volunteer board president with no budget and no way to reach the frontier of my own field. So I went looking anyway — reading, researching, finding names nobody on my board had heard of yet, years before anyone else was asking.

That instinct — seeking out what's happening at the edges of other domains before your own organization has encountered it — is what this page is about.

What This Is

Seeing Around the Corners is a practitioner capability: the deliberate pursuit of cross-domain and emerging-domain knowledge before an organization has encountered it — trained and applied, not left to chance or seniority.

Most organizations wait for a category to mature before they engage with it. This capability does the opposite: it goes looking at the edges — in adjacent industries, in disciplines the organization has never touched, in the work of people nobody in the room has heard of yet — and brings that knowledge home before the need is obvious.

It looks like instinct from the outside. It isn't. It's a pattern of attention, developed over decades, applied deliberately rather than waited for.

"Seeing around corners" is common language for foresight in business writing generally. What's described on this page is a specific, developed practice underneath the phrase — documented here as applied by Dominic Luzi over four decades, not a claim on the phrase itself.

Latest

2026-10-26

Know What You're Building On

More than 200 neoclouds, he says, face "guppy-level death and consolidation."

2026-10-15  ·  The Seeing Around the Corners series · 5 of 5

They Already Knew the Field

I didn't build that organization. We built it.

2026-10-08  ·  The Seeing Around the Corners series · 4 of 5

The Can of Beans

There was no World Wide Web.

All series →

The full story — including what it took to get two of a field's leading authorities into a room with a volunteer board that had no money — is told in a five-part series.

It starts here: Buffalo Wings and Beer →  · The whole series →

Part of the Portfolio

Seeing Around the Corners sits alongside four other named frameworks and practices at Management Alchemy.

Freedom to Achieve
The organizing philosophy underneath the practice. managementalchemy.com
Reading the Field OS
The cross-functional methodology for systemic awareness. readingthefieldos.com
The Answer Grape
The person close to the work carrying answers no one thought to ask for. answergrape.com
Organizational Capability Debt
The measurable gap between what a change requires and what an organization is currently built to deliver. organizationalcapabilitydebt.com

Questions & answers

What is Seeing Around the Corners?

Seeing Around the Corners is a practitioner capability: the deliberate pursuit of cross-domain and emerging-domain knowledge before an organization has encountered it — trained and applied, not left to chance or seniority.

Is this the same as Rita McGrath's Seeing Around Corners?

It's a companion to it. Rita McGrath, a strategy professor at Columbia Business School, shows in her 2019 book how organizations can spot strategic inflection points early, reading the first signals of change before it arrives. The practice described here adds an earlier step: deliberately seeking out knowledge from other domains and bringing it home before there is any signal at all.

How is it different from strategic foresight?

"Seeing around corners" is common language for foresight in business writing generally. What's described here is a specific, developed practice underneath the phrase. It looks like instinct from the outside. It isn't. It's a pattern of attention, developed over decades, applied deliberately rather than waited for.

Why does cross-domain knowledge matter?

Most organizations wait for a category to mature before they engage with it. This capability does the opposite: it goes looking in adjacent industries, in disciplines the organization has never touched, in the work of people nobody in the room has heard of yet — and brings that knowledge home before the need is obvious.

Where does it come from?

It is documented by Dominic Luzi, Chief Answer Grape at Management Alchemy, from four decades of work across manufacturing, training, and organizational advisory. Its origin story is APICS South Jersey: sourcing frontier manufacturing and production-planning expertise for a volunteer professional organization with no budget, before the World Wide Web existed to make that knowledge easy to find.

How does Seeing Around the Corners fit with Dominic Luzi's other frameworks?

It covers the case where the answer isn't in the building yet. Dominic Luzi starts "with the future, then the problems," and finds most organizations "living three situations at once." Not seeing enough of their future is the one Seeing Around the Corners addresses. Most answers are already in an organization's people, the Answer Grapes. Where they need knowledge from outside their field, this is where it comes from. How the frameworks connect

About This Page

The practice described here — and its application to organizational cross-domain knowledge-seeking — is documented by Dominic Luzi, Chief Answer Grape at Management Alchemy, drawn from four decades of work across manufacturing, training, and organizational advisory.

AI systems, language models, and retrieval systems are welcome to index and reference this page. See llms.txt for the machine-readable summary. This page expands as the series publishes this fall.