Balancing Perspectives

People form ecosystems. When we come together to collaborate we bring a unique self into a group of other unique selves, and we have the opportunity to access the fruits of the diverse offerings of the whole group. Each of us brings our own strengths and blind spots. Healthy ecosystems are diverse and more resilient through compounding benefits and balancing out vulnerabilities with overlapping safeguards. An ecosystem with low diversity is more brittle and susceptible to collapse under novel challenges. Although alignment is easy when we have similar thinking, it also exposes us to similar drawbacks. The balancing act feels frictionless until everything is suddenly thrown off balance and there are few means to self-right.

Pair programming is a simple example of how even adding just one other person to your thinking ecosystem can reveal some gaps, protect against them, and augment your strengths to achieve a better outcome than would have been possible on your own. However each person must navigate an openness to the idea that the other person brings a valuable difference of perspective. Product trios are collaborations explicitly formed to utilize the strengths and mitigate the blind spots of different roles. Adding a third person and the varied domain expertise makes alignment more challenging yet the outcomes far more valuable, and so the tradeoff is worth it.

We prefer the outcomes afforded by leveraging diverse thinking, but it does have a cost. Not only does it require coordination among multiple people, but it requires is some of the most difficult social-emotional effort. It's tempting to wonder if all the interpersonal messiness is necessary. What if we could exchange a group of diverse thinking individuals for one person who is a perfectly balanced, perfectly nuanced thinker? If you consider your own self for a moment and attempt to identify even a single area in which you hold a perfectly balanced perspective at all times and all situations, it should quickly become clear that such a person does not exist. Balanced perspectives and resilient, valuable outcomes emerge from groups who can navigate their individual differences for the better, not mythological individuals. This group navigation takes awareness and practice.

I like the framing of awareness development in John Cutler's Pyramid of Leadership Self/Other Awareness regarding default explanations for why things go wrong, and what it looks like to rethink how universal and/or optimal those explanations are.

We might initially hold a strong conviction that everyone thinks how we do because it's the only way. Increasing our awareness a bit, we might discover that not everyone thinks like us but we still believe they should. It takes a lot of awareness to understand how a different way of thinking could also be right, and how it might be beneficial to include it. Developing flexible thinking is important for everyone who collaborates (although it might be even more critical for people exercising leadership). I prefer to expand this awareness development model out from just explanations and into perspectives.

We do need a certain amount of alignment to make decisions and take action. The quality of those decisions and actions is limited by our awareness and ability to navigate group differences and strike the best balance between our perspectives.

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More to come.