Shifting Your Perspective

Safeguard Strategy 5: Shifting Your Perspective

Each of us sees things only from a particular point of view. Nobody can possibly see everything. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t shift the way we see things in any given situation.

In physics, a frame of reference is a set of coordinates for observing events. Different observers occupy different frames of reference, and what’s visible from one isn’t necessarily visible from another. For example, you occupy one frame of reference if you’re seated in a traveling train car, while I occupy a different one if I’m standing at the station, watching your train pass by. Within your frame of reference, you and the bench on which you’re sitting are stationary. From mine, though, you and the bench are both moving fast.

Imagine now that it were possible for you to shift your frame of reference. What if, for instance, I were live streaming the approach of your train to you? You would then be able to see yourself and your position from my perspective, giving you more information about your situation that wasn’t visible from your frame of reference. Suppose your train were on a collision course with an obstacle on the tracks ahead that was only visible from my frame of reference. Within your view, everything would seem fine. You wouldn’t know you were headed toward disaster. Shifting your frame of reference and seeing things from my perspective would give you crucial information and enable you to take steps to avoid a catastrophe.

What applies in the train example applies to many other cases. While you might be seated on your couch and feel stationary, from the sun’s point of view, you’re moving at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour around it. Having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what’s actually happening. Changing your perspective changes what you see.

Shifting your frame of reference is a powerful safeguard against blind spots. Michael Abrashoff’s leadership of the USS Benfold illustrates the approach. Rather than continuing to see things from the Benfold’s established frame of reference—a frame in which it was normal for officers to treat sailors as second-class citizens—Abrashoff shifted his frame of reference and looked at things instead from the perspective of ordinary sailors and ordinary fairness.

I once had a coworker who was also a friend. One day he walked into my office with some news. “I figured out what I’m doing wrong,” he said. “I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.”

The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. He was. It wasn’t that he didn’t work hard. He did. The problem was that he couldn’t relate to other people because he hadn’t even made any effort to see things through their eyes. Now he’d come to realize it himself and started to change his behavior.

From that point on, whenever he discussed something with anyone at work, he would start by offering his impressions of how the other person saw things. Then he would ask, “What did I miss?”

Asking this question is a clever move. It implies that he’s open to correction and gives the other person a chance to correct him. One of the deepest-rooted human instincts is to correct other people, so by asking this question, he makes it easy for the other person to engage with him. Then, if the other person does in fact correct him, it reveals to him which factors are most important to that person.

When the other person is done answering that first question, my friend still doesn’t offer his own thoughts right away. He first asks a follow-up: “What else did I miss?”

This approach to interpersonal communication is an example of a reference-shifting safeguard. Asking the two questions, and listening to the answers people give him, forces him to see things through other people’s eyes. Taking the time to do that protects him against a tendency that he identified as a weakness.

A few months after making the change, he became a conduit between his team and the rest of the organization. As time went on, people started asking that he accompany his boss to meetings. When his boss eventually moved to a new role, everyone wanted him to fill the vacancy. He never even had to ask.