Put yourself where perspectives collide

Spend real time with people whose worldviews, training and stakes differ from yours, and listen past their content to their values.

Pourquoi ça marche

Petrie’s second condition is colliding perspectives: exposure to people with different worldviews, opinions, backgrounds and training, which both challenges a person’s existing mental models and increases the number of perspectives through which they can see. Garvey Berger and Johnston name taking multiple perspectives as one of three habits for leading in complexity. Without collision, Petrie notes, a disrupted person tends to fall back to the conclusions they always reach.

Comment faire

1. List the three or four groups your work most affects but you rarely spend unscripted time with — another function, customers, frontline staff, critics.
2. Arrange one real conversation a month with someone from that list about a problem you share.
3. Listen in three passes, as Petrie describes CCL doing it: first for content, then for emotion, then for the values underneath.
4. Afterward write the situation as they see it, in their terms, until you could argue it well.

Données probantes

The colliding-perspectives condition, CCL’s "unnatural collisions" between people who would rarely interact, and the content–emotion–values listening progression are described in Petrie (2015). Taking multiple perspectives is one of the three habits in Garvey Berger and Johnston (2015). Both are practitioner frameworks; neither reports an outcome study of this practice. (anecdotal)

Exposure alone can harden positions as easily as it widens them; the practice depends on listening to understand, which is the hard part.

Sources

• Petrie, N. (2015). The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development–Part 2: 30 Experts, 3 Conditions, and 15 Approaches. Center for Creative Leadership white paper.
• Garvey Berger, J., & Johnston, K. (2015). Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Stanford University Press.

Erreur fréquente

Collecting diverse opinions as data while keeping your own view untouched. The point is to let a different view change the shape of the problem for you, not to note that others disagree.