I've spent more of this year outside my own time zone than in it, Munich for a Salesforce summit, Paris and Rome in the same fortnight, and long stretches in London for a consultancy project. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I noticed something shift that had nothing to do with jet lag.
Being somewhere unfamiliar seems to sharpen attention in a way that routine quietly erodes. At home, in the same office, on the same version of the same week, most of what happens around you gets filtered before you even notice it's there. Somewhere new, that filter hasn't built up yet, so you actually see what's in front of you.
You stop running on autopilot
At home, most of a working day runs on muscle memory, the same commute, the same rituals, the same shorthand with the people around you. None of that muscle memory travels with you. Every small decision, which train, which door, how the coffee order works, takes actual attention. That sounds like friction, and some days it is, but it also means you can't coast through anything. The parts of your thinking that would normally run on autopilot stay switched on, and that spills over into how you think about the business too.
Distance shows you what's actually working
It's hard to see your own business clearly from inside it. You're too close to the daily version of it, the version with all its familiar problems and familiar excuses for those problems. Sitting in a boardroom in Munich, or watching a business in a completely different industry solve a problem that looks nothing like yours on the surface but is identical underneath, gives you a version of the same distance. You start noticing what you'd normally walk straight past.
The best ideas rarely come from your own postcode
Some of the better ideas I've brought back into my own businesses over the years had nothing to do with the industry I was standing in when I found them, a reporting habit borrowed from a completely different sector, a way of thinking about a decision that came from someone whose job looks nothing like mine. The businesses that stay sharp are usually the ones borrowing well from somewhere else, and having the humility to admit that's what they're doing, rather than treating every idea as though it has to be original to count.
The bar for this is lower than it sounds. Actively seeking out somewhere, or something, unfamiliar enough that autopilot switches off, paired with the discipline to actually pay attention while you're there, is usually enough.
Where's the furthest you've been from your usual desk lately, and what did you notice there that you'd stopped seeing at home?
This kind of deliberate perspective shifting is something we dig into further in Module 15 of Ready to Rise, which looks at what changes when you step outside your usual industry and geography.
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