After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the common wisdom has been that “everything changed.” But everything did not change, and the lack of perspective that this statement conveys has produced a lot of bad outcomes. As someone who lives less than five miles from the World Trade Center towers and often works within blocks of them, I can assert that some things did change. Most obviously, there is an enormous hole in the ground where the skyscrapers once stood. And there is a sense of vulnerability and a kind of low-level depression in New York City that has not gone away in the ensuing years. But “everything changed”? Hardly.
In his recent book Second Chance, a study of American foreign policy in the last three administrations, Zbigniew Brzezinski discusses the importance of keeping all things in perspective and the terrible consequences of failing to do so. Brzezinski deals with perspective at the global strategic level, but there are important messages for leaders and managers of organizations.
A lack of perspective almost invariably produces bad results. Here are a few examples. Years ago, I was working on strengthening the management of the nursing department of a major hospital. When I asked the director what kinds of conferences she sent her staff to, she responded, “Why would we send our nurses to conferences? We’re the leaders. They come here to study us.” My immediate thoughts ran to Hitler in the bunker giving attack orders to non-existing divisions. The reality was that in virtually every aspect of nursing, from organization to the use of technology, this hospital was 20 years behind the field, and its patients were paying the price.
The CEO of a small startup firm highly dependent on contracts with major insurance companies had a conflict with one of them over health claims. In a big-time macho move, he told his assistant to send the claims back and tell the responsible official that he was canceling the contract. It took board members to convince him that this was self-destructive, to clarify for him that he was the tail and they were the dog and to put the matter into perspective. He was a pint-sized version of the Bush Administration officials who believed that they were “creating reality” rather than dealing with it. Like them, he overstated the threat or problem and greatly understated the risk.
The IT manager of a mid-sized institution had one reply to all requests: “Can’t do it, don’t have the resources.” In contrast to the grandiose and over-reaching leader or manager’s lack of perspective, his fell into the “shrinking violet” category, denying that he had the power, authority or resources that he clearly did have.
So what is perspective? In its most basic sense, perspective is having as clear a picture of reality as possible and understanding the range of choices available to us. For the manager, it is making maximum use of the knowledge that is available while always understanding that you never have enough knowledge. There is always a level of unavoidable ignorance simply because we can’t predict the future. What we want to do is minimize avoidable ignorance.
Lack of perspective comes in different flavors. It is useful to think of a continuum. At one pole — the minimalist pole — there are the shrinking violets, those who, whatever the situation, deny that anything is possible. "The problem is too big. We don’t have the resources. I lack the necessary authority. We tried once, it didn’t work." And so on. At the other extreme — the maximal pole — are those who believe that anything is possible if we just have the willpower. Think of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, or a Nike commercial. Impossible is only a word. We shape reality. Just do it!
It is unclear which kind of lack of perspective is most destructive. In recent decades, the Virgin Islands seems to have achieved the worst of both worlds, at least in the government sector. It has had grandiosity and big talkers in the legislative branch and an extreme form of shrinking-violet syndrome in the executive branch, with whole departments professing to be capable of doing nothing. The new administration is the first in a long time to reject this negative approach.
In the middle of the continuum are those who seek to put things in proper perspective. They seek knowledge because they understand that knowledge leads to understanding, which is the basis for the best possible action. They define problems as accurately as possible (Descartes: “The most corrupting lies are problems misstated.”) They chart a course of action that finds the best possible solution or the outer edge of achievable change. They are not whiners or excuse makers, nor are they over-reachers or big talkers. They are capable of saying, “I don’t know.”
Keeping things in perspective is a discipline. There are three valuable tools for achieving and maintaining perspective. They come in the form of questions:
Where do I (we) fit? Perspective and context go together. In this situation, what leverage do we have? What resources do I have that can be applied in a useful way? What is my (our) role? Whose help do I need? When we understand where we fit and what we bring to the mix, we are better able to avoid the failures of over-reaching and under-reaching.
What is the story? An important part of our knowledge base is gained by understanding how we got here, how whatever the challenge we face developed in the first place. The political scientists Richard Neustadt and Ernest May describe this process as “thinking in time.” We build our knowledge base and understanding by learning about the history, the story, of whatever we are dealing with. This is not the same as learning the so-called “lessons of history,” which are rarely what they seem to be. It is about seeing that there is a story — a river of events — and understanding where in the flow of that river we are now and how we got here.
What is it like? To give additional context and perspective, it is always useful to look for meaningful comparisons from the past or present because these can give us a glimpse of alternative futures. Here we sometimes do know what happened. What are the similarities and what are the differences when compared to another situation? What were their choices in a similar situation? In their place and as a decision-maker, what would I have done, and why?
In some ways, we live in the age of anti-perspective. We are bombarded with the “views” of lobotomized television commentators, all willing to make predictions based on nothing or some ideology. These predictions are invariably binary — there are always only two sides to any story — and lacking in any nuance. They typically have a shelf-life of one or two news cycles. Acknowledging complexity or the limits of our knowledge brands a person as a wimp — or, even worse, a liberal. For example, a group of FOX News commentators ridiculed the notion that global warming could be a greater threat to our future than terrorism. They employed typical binary logic, i.e., if we addressed global warming, we could not defeat terrorism. And they — again in typical and destructive fashion — used their so-called analysis to trash someone, in this case, Al Gore.
Gaining perspective is a thoughtful process, an activity for grownups. It often produces solutions that are somewhere in the middle, not because they are compromises, but because — on balance — that is where the best and most achievable solutions to complex problems are often found. Asking and answering the questions above is a solid starting point.
Editor's note: Dr. Frank Schneiger is the president of Human Services Management Institute Inc., a 25-year-old management-consulting firm that focuses on organizational change. Much of his current work is in the area of problems of execution and implementing rapid changes as responses to operational proble
ms.
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