Looking Sideways

Comparable problems in other industries can reveal options that stay invisible when organisations search only among familiar solutions.

Companies usually benchmark within their own industry, and the logic is sound: competitors face similar customers, regulations, technologies and economics. Yet the similarity is also a limitation. Organisations that share a history inherit the same assumptions, use the same language and optimise around the same boundaries. Comparing them reveals who performs the familiar approach best, but not whether a different approach exists.

A more useful comparison begins with the problem rather than the product. Reliability, inspection, traceability, handover, redundancy, human error and decision-making under uncertainty appear in many fields. A hospital, an airline, a refinery and a software business have little in common operationally, yet each must decide how critical information moves between people, how weak signals are escalated and how failure in one part of a system is prevented from propagating through the rest.

Direct transfer is rarely possible; regulations, consequences and technologies differ. What transfers is the logic used to frame the problem. An industry that developed under different constraints may have asked a different first question, and that question may have opened options that never entered the home industry’s solution set. A hospital has little to teach a refinery about process equipment and a great deal to teach it about how critical information survives a shift change.

Inspection illustrates the point. One sector organises inspection around fixed intervals because access is expensive and regulation historically favoured periodic examination. Another organises around continuous condition data because sensors became economical earlier. A third organises around consequence rather than probability because certain failures cannot be tolerated. None is universally superior. Comparing them exposes the assumptions that connect inspection effort to risk reduction, which is more useful than comparing inspection frequencies.

Comparison of this kind is most valuable when a mature industry describes a limitation as unavoidable. If the limitation is physical, other domains will meet an equivalent boundary. If it is historical, another field may have developed without it. The contrast does not prove that an alternative will work, but it turns an invisible assumption into something that can be examined. It also widens the search before an organisation commits to a solution category: instead of asking which inspection technology to buy, it can ask how other fields detect deterioration when direct access is expensive. And it supplies scepticism as well as inspiration, since a technology presented as disruptive in one industry may be routine in another, where its limitations are already well understood.

The discipline required is to compare structures rather than surfaces. A hospital ward is not a tank terminal, and pretending otherwise produces shallow analogies. The useful question is what is similar in the decision problem: incomplete information, many handovers, rare failures with severe consequences, competing objectives, degradation over time. When the structure is genuinely comparable, the unfamiliar surface becomes an advantage, because it strips away the assumptions attached to familiar terminology.

Deep industry expertise remains indispensable, because context matters. Occasional distance from it is also necessary, because experience makes existing boundaries feel natural. Looking sideways provides that distance without abandoning evidence, by asking where else this kind of problem exists and what became possible there because people started from different constraints.