See the invisible
How Top Operators Anticipate Chaos Before It Hits
There is TREMENDOUS opportunity missed by individuals who "just do the work".
This is especially true inside fast-scaling fintechs—where the stakes are high, timelines are tight, and misalignment can kill momentum overnight.
Execution is expected.
Situational awareness is the real differentiator.
Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash
If you look past the immediate work, you will be at a distinct advantage. This doesn't mean you ignore the work in front of you...rather you're looking at the entire environment around you. This is situational awareness. Situational awareness is the ability to perceive, understand, and anticipate what is happening in the environment around you. You have a clear understanding of your surroundings, including the people, the elements, events at hand and how they are interacting with each other in that period.
You learn to SEE THE INVISIBLE.
Situational awareness isn’t new. It can be traced back to early military theories, including The Art of War by Sun Tzu where he talks about the terrain, understanding positioning, strategies and decision-making when at war. His book was a masterclass in it.
🧠 1. Know yourself, know your enemy
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Internal and external scanning. Sun Tzu emphasizes self-awareness (capabilities, weaknesses, morale) and environmental scanning (terrain, enemy intent, timing). In fintech this is knowing your leadership capabilities, your platform, customers, competition, staff, partners and your market.
🗺️ 2. Terrain and timing matter
“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”
Sun Tzu obsessively studied terrain, not just physical but also positional advantage. Nowadays this is company culture, technical debt, regulatory environment — invisible forces that either enable or block execution.
🕵️ 3. Use of spies = early signal intelligence
“Foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits… it must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.”
This is the original signal intelligence strategy. Sun Tzu calls for active intelligence gathering — a metaphor today for listening posts in your org, market-sensing functions, and situational testing. Think: shadow product roadmaps, dry-run GTMs, pulse checks on delivery teams.
🧭 4. Avoid predictable moves
“All warfare is based on deception.”
If your opponent can read you, they control the tempo. Sun Tzu recommends misdirection, feints, and adaptability — core to staying situationally aware and hard to pin down. In scaling fintechs, this means not over-indexing on frameworks or falling into agile theatre. Look at focus, outcomes and adapting based on the needs of the work/environment vs. “following the process”.
⚖️ 5. Strong leaders shape the field, not just respond to it
“The skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible.”
Sun Tzu wasn’t just about reaction. He was about shaping the environment to force errors from the opponent. In product delivery, this translates to pre-wiring stakeholders, changing the sequencing of dependencies, and controlling perception. You want leverage and positive outcomes.
Situational awareness is dynamic, layered, and deeply strategic. For Sun Tzu, it wasn’t about being reactive — it was about always sensing, always shaping.
Eventually, a theoretical model was created by Dr. Mica Endsley made up of three levels/constructs:
Perception: The ability to sense and perceive what is happening
Comprehension: The ability to understand the significance of what is happening
Projection: The ability to anticipate what is likely to happen
This model serves as a foundation to ground yourself on learning and advancing your situational awareness abilities. These levels are not meant to be serial but rather all parts of the construct to know, understand, and connect so that you can best deal with situations. While situational awareness stems from the military for emergencies, it is a critical skill to be used day/day as a top Operator.
Situational awareness real life…
You’re leading engineering/tech. You’ve got mounting pressures, regulatory fog, risk/sec teams staring you down to fix findings/gaps, ambitious timelines, and teams shipping fast. BUT the outcomes you need aren’t there…you need to better understand what is going on and WHY!
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You need to be aware of multiple factors (and determine how to use the information). This is how you operate at a whole other level:
Prime example: I once worked with a senior executive who didn’t read the room with his peers. He pushed a transformation mandate without building alignment first and it cost six months of political churn just to get the other execs to see the value. He had no champions of the cause. All of it could’ve been avoided with better situational awareness.
Stakeholders
Who really owns the outcome? Who’s funding it?
Who are the key influencers and champions?
Who’s quietly resisting?
Who do you actually need to keep aligned?
Team dynamics
Is the team behind or just under-supported?
Is your strongest engineer about to burn out?
Culture & context
Is this an empowered org—or command and control in disguise?
Are priorities real—or political?
Priorities
Is your work top of mind, or are you about to get bumped by someone louder?
External pressures
New regulation?
Partner chaos?
AI-enabled competition?
All of it matters.
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Why Situational Awareness Matters More with AI
AI can help you write emails, summarize market intel, generate solutions and now even provide management consulting with enough information fed to it.
BUT…
It can’t read a room.
It won’t notice when a stakeholder goes silent.
Or when engineering’s tone shifts from optimistic to disengaged.
Or that quiet friction between your lead engineer and product manager.
AI accelerates everything—including mistakes.
Situational awareness is your counterbalance.
The more your company relies on AI to move fast, the more you need human intelligence to interpret the noise, feel the tension, and act with precision.
Fintechs that win won’t just scale faster.
They’ll sense faster.
What You Get
If you invest in this skill (it’s really a toolbox of skills vs. an individual one) you’re going to see tremendous gains:
Earlier visibility into risk and misalignment
Sharper decisions in complex, high-stakes moments
Confidence to adjust course before it’s too late
The trust of execs who see you’re not guessing—you’re seeing the patterns and trajectory of work
The key is to be curious and get your reps in…practice, fail, learn, adapt and go forward.
You become the person who sees what others miss. You can see the invisible.
Time to value (and market) rule…and situational awareness is YOUR edge.
Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash
Where to Start
As I noted earlier, you need to get your reps in:
Listen to what’s not being said.
Ask better questions. Curiosity is your best friend here.
Watch body language in meetings; especially leaders.
Map stakeholders, don’t just meet them.
Observe priorities in action, not on slides.
Track the vibe of your team over time.
Every signal tells a story.
Your job is to pick up the signals and shape the strategy (and the storylines).
Final Thought
Failure happens because nobody sees the iceberg.
You need to SEE THE INVISIBLE.
Steer your company toward faster outcomes, cleaner execution, and bigger wins with situational awareness.
Thanks for reading,
-Adam