An outside set of eyes sees what the people inside have learned to work around.

I spent twenty years working inside organizations where knowledge lived in people's heads and managers spent their days cleaning up errors a clearer system would have prevented.

Early in my career, a trainer pulled me aside before my first day handling work independently. 'This job is easy,' she said. 'It's just a lot of clicks.' She had been doing the work for years. What she could not see was what I saw sitting next to her: a new hire nodding along, afraid to admit they were lost.

I hold a Master's degree from the University of Birmingham, a project management certification, and spent a decade designing learning environments at Yeungnam University in South Korea. Twenty years living and working in Asia, comfortable in Korean and Mandarin, sharpened my ability to see what people had accepted as the cost of running a business.