Try these simple mental moves to broaden your understanding

St Pancras International is one of my favourite buildings in London.

The Gothic Revival tower is on the right of the photograph below. The dome on the left caps Kings Cross station, with the famous Platform 9¾.

Let’s practice shifting our perspectives around this scene.

If you were in the clock tower, at the top, looking back on the photographer — what might you see? Or maybe from the windows of the Great Northern Hotel in the centre of the photograph. Would you be hearing something different from where you are? Now zoom down to street level. Imagine the sounds of the traffic, the Black cabs and the approaching bus. Imagine you just walked up from the underground into the fresh air — what might you be feeling?

The skills, dispositions and routines of shifting perspectives are potent catalysts to better thinking and dialogue.

Here is a selection of perspectives to explore.

10 Shifts in Perspective To Unlock Insight and Understanding

1. Individual (introspective) — You might easily skip over this one, but don’t underestimate the challenge of reflecting on what you truly feel or believe.

Regular introspection and reflection allow us to capture what is happening with our disposition—the ups, downs and spirals.

2. Relational perspective We will often say put relationships first. This founding principle of my business and how I work with people had often guided me when the next step was unclear.

Taking the perspective of the relationship is a valuable space to think and talk about. I appreciate how Diana McLain Smith outlines some of the assumptions of a robust relational perspective, which are often rare to see in practice.

The framing of relationships as a strategic asset and the “reasonable people can reasonably disagree” are ideas that resonate. What about you?

This perspective is based on a core belief best expressed by Karl Popper:

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal.

3. Retrospective — Looking back is a critical perspective to explore. Future innovations will build on the success of the past. They are not disconnected.

What worked? What didn’t? Retrospective thinking focuses on learning from your experiences by looking at how you have done something previously or why a particular solution has been successful in the past.

Educators can use this information when faced with a similar issue in the future as it allows them to predict what is most likely to occur next time they meet that challenge again.

4. Prospective — Move your perspective and frame of reference forward in time. Scan the horizon and look ahead. What are you looking forward to? I imagine a time when…

Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with strategic planning and is something I use frequently.

• “I can imagine a time when we …”
• “It is clear that in the future, we might be…”
• “When this is in place, the benefits are likely to be…”

5. Prospective Hindsight —casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back. What do you wish you had done sooner with this project? If only we had…

Strategic planning is all about prospecting to imagine a future scenario — Prospective Hindsight explores and recognises the risks and issues that might occur.

Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.

6. Organisation perspective — When we take the broader organisation’s view, we detach from any individual and look for collective insight.

There are a whole bunch of anthropomorphic perspectives you could explore that stem from this.

• What would next year’s budget say about this?
• If our current outdoor facilities had a seat at this table, what would they say to us?
• I hear that pile of desktop PCs moaning at me every time I walk passed the store room? “Why!!”

It can be fun and imaginative work. Our playful exploration of alternative perspectives can stretch and morph into many different shapes and sizes—a sophisticated mixture of critical and creative thinking. By casting our net widely, we might surface an undiscovered insight.

Richard Boston outlines four broadening perspectives; I have included some elaborations from Jacqueline Conway’s article to help us distinguish between them.

7. First-person perspective — We’re concerned only with our point of view: ‘this is what I think; this is how I feel.’ Amidst all the perspective shifts, remember to return to this one and make up your mind!
8. Second-person perspective — With the thoughts and feelings of another person, we take the stance of: ‘I can understand and appreciate how you feel — even if I don’t agree.’
9. Third-person perspective — This allows us to take a more objective position.

In the third-person perspective, you might ask, ‘What’s really going on here?’ It’s in this space that we lift ourselves up to take the helicopter view. Crucially, we resist ‘taking on’ one or other of the points of view of the individuals involved and instead look at the interaction and the situation without the biases, filters and mind traps that are inevitable when we occupy either the first- or second-person perspective.

10. Fourth-person perspective Above all the noise of multiple perspectives, there’s a deeper structure to what’s going on.

The ability to take this meta-perspective is what’s required in the fourth-person ‘witness’ perspective. From this stance, we’re aware of the context in which relationships play out. We see that there is a deep structure to the nature of the problem and that the people involved are often unwittingly caught up in that structure.

Assume You are Wrong

It is all well and good to shift perspective in various ways, but it isn’t significant unless you do something with that new insight.

We cannot be guarded or defensive about an alternative version or viewpoint.

We need to let the insight in to make the most of a new perspective. Nobody is saying you need to agree. To improve our thinking (and projects), we must leave the door open to other insights adding value.

What if we had the humility to accept that we don’t have all the answers; that the answers that we have might be wrong; and that those with insightful new perspectives might be located in the most unusual and humblest of places? This attitude has the potential to shift the dominant either/or narrative in our culture to an altogether more fruitful place.

Here is an example of protocols I use when starting design and development sessions. The last time I used these as part of a moderation session for student observations.

Have a go; you are welcome to use them. At the start of a session, display the following protocols and spend 5–10mins defining them and exploring why they are important to you.

1 - We are non-judgmental; this is a safe space to share our understanding.
2 - We assume that we are wrong. We are all trying to be less wrong.
3 - We are open to other perspectives and ideas.
4 - We expect to be hard on content and soft on people.

Is this a good time to share some feedback?

We explored the endeavour of ‘being less wrong’ in issue #178.

The assumption of right or wrong helps understand why some people are so ineffective at receiving feedback.

Assuming you are right might be a motivating force, sustaining the enormous effort that conducting scientific work requires. But it also makes it easy to construe criticisms as personal attacks and for scientific arguments to devolve into personal battles. Beginning, instead, from the assumption you are wrong, a criticism is easier to construe as a helpful pointer, a constructive suggestion for how to be less wrong — a goal that your critic presumably shares.

How do we turn this into a practical method or tactic?

● Think about something you might say or the language you use that signals readiness for feedback.
● What language shows you are beginning from the assumption 'you are wrong'?
● How do you know if someone has an open disposition and is ready to listen to constructive suggestions?