Exploring the Power of Perspective
The angle we approach from alters all
You never know when someone, or something, you weren’t expecting to connect with can—in a matter of minutes, even—change your perspective.
In a TEDxWarwickSalon talk delivered four years ago next month, British financial analyst and author Toyosi Somoye stated succinctly what I, too, believe to be true:
The biggest battle that you ever face is in your mind.
After sharing a series of personal stories to illustrate her point, Somoye inserted a powerful exhortation:
Today I challenge you to mind your mind.
I will willingly take Somoye up on her call to cranial action. My mind, as she says, has a huge influence over the way I see, experience, and act in the world. It’s an understanding that I’ve shared extensively in both Managing Ourselves and The Power of Beliefs in Business. The workings of our mind, as Somoye points out, are not fixed in stone. Rather, she rightly reminds us, “You possess the choice to change how you perceive any given situation.”
What follows, then, is just that—my still-changing perspective on the importance of perspective: its impact on our leadership and our lives, the way we see (and act about) the past, how we engage in the present, and what we will do in the future. Perspective, it’s become clear to me, matters far, far more than most casual observers have cause to imagine. Enter any situation from a different angle, and you’re likely to arrive at alternate understandings.
Perspective, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is the practical application of beliefs. Change your perspective, and the odds increase significantly that you’ll also soon be open to changing your beliefs. As I wrote in The Power of Beliefs in Business, when we change our beliefs, that means we also change our actions. Change your actions, and you change your life. Which means that what we believe will alter the quality of our lives. An anagram for “belief” is “be life.”
Truth be told, most modern Americans probably ignore the import of perspective altogether. It’s certainly not a subject that consciously comes up in a lot of everyday conversations. It’s actually all too common that we get locked into believing that our own perspective is, self-evidently, the right one. After all, if those around us tell us over and over again that our perspective is correct, we gradually begin to accept it. It’s in the ABCs of authoritarian leadership at any level: surround yourself with people who support your beliefs and plans, they tell you what you want to hear, and before too long, your “reality” will be way out of whack with what’s actually going on in the world.
A 2020 study out of Vanderbilt University showed how susceptible we all are to this dangerous scenario, demonstrating that “unreliable cues such as repetition” often influence our perception of truth. Lisa Fazio, the psychology professor who led the project, says,
In general, statements that you hear multiple times are more likely to be true than something you are hearing for the first time. Even by the age of 5, children are using that knowledge to use repetition as a cue when making truth judgments. This is useful most of the time, but it can cause problems when the repeated statements are false.
This is, of course, the painful reality we face today on a national level and, in less charged ways, within our own organizations as well. The same inaccurate story repeated multiple times is likely to become the perspective through which many people will view a situation, regardless of reality. Over time, more and more folks begin to believe it, and then act accordingly. As people buy into mainstream beliefs, alternative perspectives are pushed to the periphery and perceived as socially unacceptable, or even written off altogether. In the long run, all involved are apt to suffer from this narrow-mindedness, but in the near term, no one may even notice.
Why bother to address this? Well, for one, because without perspective, the world looks flat. That “reality” is reflected in these lines taken from award-winning poet Chelsea Jenning’s lovely piece, “Before the Invention of Perspective in Painting”:
The sword and the sky are contiguous,
the halo of one saint the face of another.Every leaf on the tree turns to be seen.
Angels never fall through the unevenazurite, the hand stays grafted to the heart.
Devotion is possible. No thing behindthe color of a rock. Gold stops at the garment,
touches it, touches what skin is exposed.Now mother and child need only one body.
The impossible bowl of wine will not spill.
Last week, author Thomas Friedman titled his New York Times op-ed about geopolitics “The New Physics of Power.” Friedman was writing about his newly arrived-at perspective on a shift in global power to a previously unheard-of reality where small nations can now upend and even undo far bigger, far richer, and far better-armed countries—countries that should, from a conventional perspective, dominate disagreements. Friedman’s new physics of power is about how that last “should” has gone to seed and, as he says, “how easy it is becoming for the small to act big.”
The new physics of power that I’m considering here is the one that Toyosi Somoye centers her thinking on—namely, what happens inside our own heads. By learning to make even a seemingly small shift in our perspective, we suddenly start to see all sorts of new things. Somoye says she learned a lot from a good friend who would ask her, in any given circumstance, what she saw, and then suggest she look again: “Look harder,” her friend would say, “for there is more.” When we elect more effective perspectives, we ultimately gain positive power in our respective ecosystems. And healthy decisions nearly always come—even when made quickly—after we have effectively considered a situation from a diverse set of perspectives.
This famous quote by pioneering 20th-century psychologist Steve de Shazer sums up the power of perspective very strikingly:
Where you stand determines what you see and what you do not see; it determines also the angle you see it from; a change in where you stand changes everything.
De Shazar, who was born in Milwaukee in 1940, did work that was a wonderful study of the same basic principles we now know as “positive psychology.” He would go on to become, in the late 1970s, a co-founder of what today is called “solution-focused brief therapy,” or SFBT. In the context of positive psychology, de Shazar would famously say, “Problem talk creates problems. Solution talk creates solutions.” With that maxim in mind, he encouraged his clients and students to always focus on the positive—“find out what works, and do more of that,” he would say regularly.
Originally trained as a jazz saxophonist, de Shazer also developed approaches very aligned with what we practice here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) as visioning. In 1978, the same year I was starting to learn how to be a line cook, de Shazer and his wife, Insoo Kim Berg, opened the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. There they put their principles into play, shifting the psychology field’s then-common focus on what was wrong to a more positive effort to build on what was going well. Rather than digging deeply into a client’s childhood, and talking only about what had happened once upon a time, de Shazar’s perspective was mostly about what was possible to make happen going forward. As he would famously say, his goal was to “define therapy as dealing with the present and the future, rather than the past.” Instead of the all-too-easy-to-fall-into fear of failure and where we might go awry, de Shazar systemically shifted his clients’ mindsets to look positively on the future, emphasizing, “It is a question of when the changes will happen, not if.” So, as in the visioning work we learned from Stas’ Kazmierski, the aim is to explore “what it will be like after you’ve successfully made the change.”
An interview with de Shazer conducted by Harry Norman, Mark McKergow, and Jenny Clarke describes the positive perspective that de Shazer stood by: “The solutions approach is concerned with helping the client to find out what works for him, so that he can do that more, and what doesn’t work, so that he can do that less.” Many of de Shazer’s stated principles align well with our perspective on business here in the ZCoB, starting with a positive belief in people and the “learner-centered” technique that underlies all of ZingTrain’s work (and our organization-wide approach to training as well):
Problems arise from the way people act, react and interact—they are not pathological in origin; …
what is important is the client’s view of what’s going on—there is no other relevant model;
people have within themselves the strengths and resources needed to solve their own problems—the therapist is simply a facilitator; …
in order to change, the client has to behave differently or see things in a different light—that’s all.
One method de Shazer and Berg applied was an exercise they called “the Miracle Question.” It’s a perspective on what’s possible that’s very much in line with how we work here with visioning. As Shazer explains,
The Miracle Question evolved out of one day Insoo asking a question [of a client], and the answer was, “Oh, it would take a miracle!” and Insoo said, “Well yes, suppose … suppose a miracle did happen” … and that started the whole thing. The answer was pretty nice, whatever it was … the answer was nice.
Rather than get caught up in the typical “how will we get there?” questions that human beings can so easily become blocked by, the Miracle Question (and visioning as well) situates our minds in the future period after the given “miracle” has happened.
Author Hanif Abdurraqib has helped to offer thousands of readers new perspectives on modern-day American life. As The New York Times wrote, his book A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance uses “tales of Black performers to make poignant observations about race in America. [It] is also a candid self-portrait of Abdurraqib’s experience as a Black man.” In the book (which I highly recommend reading), he offers insight into the beauty that it becomes possible to access when we make regular efforts to consider the world through a diverse set of perspectives.
Abdurraqib has lived most of his life in Columbus, Ohio. And although it’s easy to slip into seeing things only from one’s own comfortable perspective, Abdurraqib has made a ritual of taking in alternative angles on his hometown. As he explains, “When I was in my early 20s, I would simply drive circles around [Highway I-]270, starting about an hour before the sun was slated to go down, watching the sunset from every angle.” And, he adds, I-270 is “a loop that catches the city at all of its best angles.” To Toyose Somoye’s point, the harder Abdurraqib looks, the more he sees: more beauty, greater insight, more empathy, better understanding. What would typically be a perfunctory drive taken in rush-hour traffic is turned into a mindful experience of poetic elegance:
The reason I always picked sunset to make these circular drives around the outerbelt is because as a commitment to my sometimes unwieldy romanticism, I surrender to the reality of the infinite catalog of sunsets. That each one falls upon the city a different way every time that it happens, and therefore, the veil of light’s final walk drags itself across the corners of this place with a different pace or ferocity each day. A different tone of red catches the glass windows of the mundane rows of office buildings that are, by the miracle of radiance, made a bit more spectacular. The giant Frisch’s Big Boy mascot atop the restaurant—a large, grinning child in overalls, holding a burger on a plate, wide-eyed and eager—catches shards of gleaming orange across his hands.
We all, I believe, have the ability to see similar beauty in parts of our lives that we long ago began to take for granted.
Abdurraqib’s ritual has made his drive a systemic generator of new perspectives. He is, after all, clear and cognizant about the fact that he is driving a loop—it repeats on itself each time—and yet, as he says, each ride remains a bit different:
The circle makes sense to me. The series of returns makes sense, to say, I am not done seeking you, I am not done figuring out every way the light can fall over every part of you it hasn’t been fortunate enough to fall upon yet.
Abdurraqib got me thinking about ways we, too, might systemically put frameworks in place through which we would be reminded to examine alternative perspectives. It’s all, as Toyosi Somoye says, about learning to more effectively mind our minds.
Abdurraqib’s observations also reminded me of another framework—one that’s built around a team exercise we learned from Stas’ Kazmierski 30-something years ago. It’s called “the Six Hats.” I didn’t know it then, but I now know that it came from a book called Six Thinking Hats by the Maltese physician Edward de Bono, published in 1985, just three years after we opened the Deli. The Six Hats is a systemic approach to putting diverse perspectives into play in any conversation.
As I recall from what Stas’ used to say, you can assign different people in a group to wear a particular hat throughout a meeting. Or, alternatively, the whole group can conversationally work its way through each hat as a team—i.e., everyone first wears “the white hat,” and then the yellow, et cetera. The de Bono Group explains:
The White Hat calls for information known or needed. “The facts, just the facts.”
The Yellow Hat symbolizes brightness and optimism. Under this hat, you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.
The Black Hat represents risks, difficulties, problems. It’s the risk-management hat, probably the most powerful hat; a problem, however, if overused. Spot difficulties where things might go wrong, why something may not work. Inherently an action hat with the intent to point out issues of risk with intent to overcome them.
The Red Hat signifies feelings, hunches, and intuition. When using this hat, you can express emotions and feelings and share fears, likes, dislikes, loves, and hates.
The Green Hat focuses on creativity; the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
The Blue Hat is used to manage the thinking process. It’s the control mechanism that ensures the Six Thinking Hats guidelines are observed.
The idea is that the various perspectives bring new insight, empathy, and info to the fore, leading—at times, at least—to better understandings of the world and then, hopefully, better decisions. The different hats are an attempt to open new doors, to present us with new possibilities. De Bono describes how new perspectives make new paths possible: “We may have a perfectly adequate way of doing something, but that does not mean there cannot be a better way. So we set out to find an alternative way.” And as he once said, “If you never change your mind, why have one?”
Another helpful framework for enhancing our perspective comes to us from Eastern Canada. Twenty-two years ago, in 2004, two elders from the region’s Indigenous Mi’kmaq people, Albert and Murdena Marshall, partnered with Professor Cheryl Bartlett of Cape Breton University to develop what they came to call “two-eyed seeing.” As Albert Marshall explains, the concept “refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing and using both of these eyes together.” Over time, people who practice two-eyed seeing internalize the (appropriate, I would suggest) belief that there are always multiple perspectives from which one might view the world.
This is, by definition, why diversity in an organization pays off so positively, by bringing a healthy range of perspectives into the conversational pot. Different people look at things in very different ways—and while bringing them all together may sometimes feel awkward in the moment, it’s much better in the long run!
My good friend Lex Alexander in North Carolina long ago taught me another useful framework for considering diverse perspectives in a business setting. Lex’s model was based on a visual image of holding a piece of string stretched tightly around our two thumbs and forefingers. In the model, the four digits represent, respectively, the customers, the staff, the organization, and the owners/shareholders. It takes all four fingers for the string to stay in place. If we ignore any of them, the string will fall slack. On any given issue, it requires only a couple minutes to consider the perspective of each of the four—and when you do reach your decision, it will almost certainly be more sensitively and effectively made.
Many of the systems, frameworks, and processes I mention in my own writings are, I see now, effective ways to consider multiple perspectives before moving ahead in any situation: open-book management, open meetings, using consensus for decision-making at the Partner level, Staff Partners, Bottom-Line Change, and other approaches are all guarantees that no single perspective can be pushed forward before reflecting on alternative angles.
When we change our perspective, even long-accepted stories can start to seem strange. The commonly told tale of American democracy is that it was developed by freethinking, freedom-loving European dissidents who had decided to come to North America. Take a different perspective, and the whole story shifts significantly—it becomes far more likely that Europeans learned about how to run a democracy from the Haudenosaunee peoples of northern New York State, who had, for centuries before European arrival, governed themselves through a consensus process not wholly unlike ours in the ZCoB. When you shift the perspective, the evidence becomes abundant. Jessica Jones, writing for the Institute of Natural Law, shares,
Benjamin Franklin was not just a peripheral observer of the Haudenosaunee system—he was a student of it. During his time as Pennsylvania’s Indian commissioner, he developed sustained relationships with Haudenosaunee leaders, regularly attending councils and witnessing firsthand the Confederacy’s ability to unite diverse nations without coercion. His admiration became formalized in 1754 at the Albany Congress, where he proposed a Plan of Union modeled explicitly “on the plan of the Iroquois.” He was calling for a federation—not unlike the one already thriving among the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.
In Forgotten Founders, historian Bruce E. Johansen writes that Franklin’s experience with the Iroquois was not incidental—it was woven into his development of revolutionary theory and his advocacy of federal union. The Confederacy provided an existing example of what European thinkers had only theorized: leaders as servants of the people, governance by consensus, the right to impeach corrupt officials, freedom of expression, protections against unlawful home intrusion, participation by women, and the equitable distribution of resources. It was a system of self-rule.
Although it’s not widely known in the US, back in the summer of 1744, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the Haudenosaunee chief Canassatego came to speak to the leaders of the still-uncertain American colonies. At that point, each colony functioned almost like a separate country, with ultimate decision-making still residing with the royal family and Parliament in London. With great thoughtfulness and passion, Canassatego encouraged colonial leaders to consider an alternative perspective: the Iroquois model of shared government—a confederacy kept together by common purpose and a commitment to dignity, respect, and a set of mutually agreed-upon laws.
During his talk, Canassatego shared the story of the Haudenosaunee and the six arrows. To demonstrate the weakness of one of the six nations in the Confederacy when it stood on its own, he pulled out a single arrow and then snapped it over his thigh. By contrast, he said, when the six nations were unified, they were unbeatable. To prove his point, he took out an additional six arrows and tied them together. No one could break the bundle. If you have a dollar bill in your pocket, take a look at the back for a minute—you’ll see the American adaptation: an eagle holding 13 arrows! The belief behind it? We are far, far stronger when we stick together.
Proximity can be a big factor in perspective as well. Bosses who end up isolated from what happens in the day-to-day nearly always have a hard time keeping things in proper perspective. From afar, it’s easy to imagine what’s going on in wholly inaccurate ways. Decisions that may seem smart at headquarters can appear silly at the point of implementation. As pioneering psychiatrist and author Irwin Yalom once observed, “If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.” The lyrics of the beautiful and touching song “Goodbye to a River” by the band Little Mazarn, from the equally beautiful record Sing Along the Borderline—produced to raise money to keep the Rio Grande Valley intact—describe a potent example of a powerfully ineffective far-away perspective:
Many miles from here, in a building, someone’s looking at a map, of a place they have never been. They’ve got a marker out, their points plotted, they’re drawing a big red line, all the way down the Rio Grande. … They say the land out there is useless and the people are complacent and the project could start today.
Reading—or taking advantage of other widely available ways to learn—is one of the best methods I know to position oneself to experience alternative perspectives. In an essay published two years ago, entitled “‘Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.’ The Incendiary Power of Literature in an Era of Censorship,” Kenneth C. Davis shares a sense of the book world that is very parallel to my own:
As a historian, I look to the past to understand the present. … The Renaissance and the flowering of humanism came about because people learned about old ideas—very old ideas from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the Arabic world. Many had been suppressed because they had been considered pagan heresy.
During World War II, while the Nazis burned books and people, the United States made a remarkable decision to give books away. Under a plan launched in 1943 by a consortium of American publishers known as the Council on Books in Wartime, millions of Armed Services Editions were printed and distributed for free to Americans at war. Members of the armed services were encouraged to read more books.
Davis’s perspective drew me in; in fact, it fascinated me. I’d had no idea about the Council on Books in Wartime. Reading his essay brought me right back to what I wrote last month about the steady upsurge in reading in Ukraine in recent years. Ironically, the same day that essay arrived in your inboxes, The Atlantic published a piece that declared exactly the opposite. Entitled “The End of Reading Is Here,” it gloomily pronounced that reading was on the way out. I read the article, but I still don’t agree. Here in the ZCoB, our perspective is clear—we believe in books and reading.
Which, I suppose, is why I am currently working on my next pamphlet, about the metaphorical organizational ecosystem model. Why the Deli has a cookbook coming out next year, co-authored by Managing Partner Rodger Bowser and staff writer Lindsay-Jean Hard (which you can preorder today!). Why ZingTrain will host author Fred Reichheld, presenting on his classic book The Ultimate Question, on October 7. And why the Roadhouse continues to program book events, which, I’m not surprised, usually book out. In fact, they’ve been so popular that the Roadhouse crew, led by Front of House Manager Kendall Monaghan, are launching their own book club. Reading may be on the decline somewhere, but not around these parts. Knowing that, during World War II, America was giving out free books en masse makes me smile—and contrast and compare that to our current, seemingly low-reading, book-banning situation. As Davis writes,
Today we are in a new War of Ideas. Like all wars, this one is about control, fear, and power. The opponents of books have decided that some books contain ideas that disturb a carefully ordered world. … So, first they come for the books.
This battle over books is profoundly disturbing to me. For many years, I have lived a life in books. Books made me who I am. An avid library goer from childhood, a voracious reader, a former bookseller, and a writer, I have long advocated for reading, learning, and knowing. I have always tried to champion the power of books to sharpen critical thinking, question easy assumptions, and facilitate the spread of knowledge. I believe that open books open minds.
To win this current War of Ideas we need first to acknowledge how much books matter. How they educate, inform, and inspire. We need to fight for the right to read what we want to read. And, perhaps most importantly, we simply need to read more books.
I hope that all of this might have encouraged you to consider some different perspectives going forward. Mind your mind. And let me know what you learn!
In the meantime, these lines from Seattle singer-songwriter Laura Veirs’s wonderful song “Wind Is Blowing Stars,” from her terrific 2018 album, Carbon Glacier,speak to the power of perspective:
Take your pick, oh, take your pick
And dig into the earth
You’ll find a muted pearl
Its worth it will never self-disclose
It’s your job to dig and polish, you know
It’s our work, I believe, to dig and polish by always exploring at least a handful of perspectives to better see what vantages the world has to offer. You never know what tomorrow might tell you.
