Nightclubs and enterprise sales are both gatekeeping. Museums and Netflix are both attention retention. Airports and emergency rooms are both triage under constraints.

See structure, not surface, and solutions transfer instantly.

The Blindspot

Companies search for solutions within their own walls. Same industry. Same competitors. Same reference points.

Same inputs. Same outputs. Your competitors' solutions become your ceiling.

The breakthrough moments come from adjacent spaces. Different industries solving similar problems. Different contexts revealing universal patterns.

Pattern Recognition

Tokyo's railway engineers couldn't optimise their network. Then they looked at slime mold.

This brainless organism creates incredibly efficient networks when searching for food. They placed oat flakes in the pattern of Tokyo's major stations. The slime mold's network was more efficient than decades of human engineering.

Larry Page didn't build search by studying search engines. He recognised that academic citations were essentially hyperlinks. The same mechanism that ranked academic authority could rank web pages.

The answer exists. You're looking in the wrong industry.

The Translation Layer

Finding parallels is one skill. Translating them is another.

Most cross-industry insights fail in translation. The mechanism works in one context but breaks in another because the underlying conditions differ.

Smart translation requires understanding why something works, not just what works. F1 pit crews transformed hospital surgery protocols. Disney's queue management revolutionised airport security. Netflix's recommendation engine reshaped retail inventory.

Obvious in hindsight. Invisible before.

What Changes

Stop asking "what are our competitors doing?" Start asking "who else has solved this class of problem?"

Your real competitors aren't in your industry. They're whoever solves your type of problem better, regardless of domain.

A luxury brand's scarcity strategy might solve a SaaS pricing problem. A military's logistics framework might transform a supply chain. A gaming company's retention mechanics might fix fintech churn.

The question stops being 'who's winning?' It becomes 'what's the physics?'