First Principles
The first thing to disappear is peripheral vision
Sreeni Iyer, Field CTO at AiDASH, on peripheral vision as the capacity that disappears first under pressure, why this-is-my-lane is a load reading and not an attitude, and the most honest accounting of AI’s productivity gains in the series.
Sreeni Iyer
Field CTO, AiDASH
What this conversation is about
Asked who he turns to when his team hits a hard problem, Sreeni Iyer describes a specific quality and gives it a name. Peripheral vision. Someone who knows their own role and delivers on it, and who also watches what flows into their station and what leaves it — who holds the whole outcome in view rather than the part assigned to them.
Asked separately, several minutes earlier, what he notices when a team starts to struggle, he described the opposite without connecting the two. Tempers fray. Finger-pointing starts. People begin saying this is my lane, this is not my problem. That is not a different subject. It is the same capacity, present in one answer and absent in the other.
Peripheral vision is one of the first things to go when people are under sustained pressure, and it goes quietly. Attention narrows to what is directly in front of you, which is exactly what you would want if the pressure were a genuine emergency and exactly what breaks a team when it is a quarter. The person still delivers their own work. They still hit their numbers. They simply stop seeing past the edge of the task. Sreeni is unusually direct about what this means: perfectly normal people start showing behaviour you would not expect from them. He is describing a state, not a set of characters.
Three things to take from this
1.
Lane-narrowing is a load reading, not an attitude.
When someone who used to catch problems upstream starts saying that is not my problem, the useful question is not what happened to them. It is what has been running for the last six weeks. The behaviour arrives in people who did not have it before, which is the tell that it is a state rather than a trait.
2.
The person you rely on is defined by what they watch, not what they ship.
Sreeni’s go-to is someone tracking what enters and leaves their station. That is the rarest and least measurable contribution on a team, and it is the first thing that disappears when the same person gets squeezed. If you want to know how much capacity is left in an organisation, watch how far past their own task people are still looking.
3.
Saying yes without naming the cost is not agility.
New work arrives mid-plan and the honest response is not refusal. It is accepting the change and making the person asking aware of what it does to what was already committed. Skipping that second half is how a plan gets absorbed silently and quality gets paid out of it, weeks before anyone sees a date move.
“Perfectly normal people will start displaying signs of stress and other behaviors which you don’t expect.”
— Sreeni Iyer
Host’s note — Dharma Ramasamy
Sreeni gave me the same capacity twice, several minutes apart, and never had reason to connect them. In one answer it is peripheral vision — the person who watches what flows into their station and what leaves it. In the other it is this is my lane, this is not my problem. Present, then absent. He was answering two different questions.
The narrowing is not a metaphor. Attention contracts under sustained arousal, and it contracts toward whatever is immediately in front of you. That is a good design when the threat is brief and physical, and a poor one when the pressure is a quarter-long delivery, because the first thing lost is the wide view — the peripheral awareness that catches the problem two stations upstream before it becomes anyone’s emergency. What makes it so hard to see from above is that nothing obvious fails. The person still delivers their own work. They hit their own numbers. The organisation loses its early-warning system while every individual dashboard stays green.
So when he says perfectly normal people start behaving in ways you would not expect, he is being more precise than he probably intended. Not different people. The same people, in a different state. Which means the intervention is not a conversation about ownership or attitude. It is finding out what has been running long enough to narrow them, and taking it off.
Be on the series.
Ten minutes, two cameras, nothing to prepare, and you see the edit before it publishes.
Get in touch →Before the lane gets narrow.
Sreeni’s team, like most, absorbs new work without anyone naming what it costs the plan already in flight. The narrowing that follows shows up in behaviour long before it shows up in a date. Seeing it while it is still cheap to act on is the work I do.
How the diagnostic works →