Perspective shifting for leaders: models for seeing every angle

Gemma and I have added a fifth tool to the strategic toolkit we're building this series, and this one was my proposal: the ability to shift perspective. The more senior you get, the more you need to demonstrate breadth, and that means being able to move beyond my job, my department, my preferences, and genuinely see a situation through someone else's eyes.

The intellectual equivalent of empathy

I think of perspective shifting as the thinking level version of empathy. Empathy is stepping into someone else's shoes to understand what they're feeling. Perspective shifting is doing the same thing but for what they're thinking, their priorities, their agenda, their view of the situation. Being able to switch from my own perspective to someone else's, and back again, matters because so much of leadership involves bringing disparate views together, managing conflict, and reconciling different stakeholder needs.

Gemma made a really useful connection here to cognitive diversity. Most teams, if we're honest, are made up of people who are fairly similar to each other, so our collective worldview has a lot of overlap in it. Perspective shifting is a way of deliberately widening that, using mental discipline to capture views that aren't our natural default.

Two models for structuring the shift

The first is Six Thinking Hats, which Edward de Bono developed back in the 1960s. It's fallen out of fashion a little, but I still think it's a brilliant, simple model. You mentally put on a different hat depending on the kind of thinking you need: blue for process, green for creativity and ideas, yellow for the positives and the value, black for caution and risk, red for feelings and emotions, and white for facts and information. The blue hat is particularly useful because it bookends a meeting, opening with what are we here to do and closing with what have we achieved and what happens next, so the conversation has a proper container rather than drifting on indefinitely.

What I like most about this model is that it gives everyone permission to fully inhabit a perspective without having to defend it. If you know you're all going to work through green and black and yellow in turn, nobody needs to cling to their preferred hat the whole time.

The second is the Disney Creative Method, which Disney has used for decades when developing film concepts. They take an idea through three separate rooms: the dreamer, who explores the ideal vision with no constraints allowed in the conversation, the realist, who works out what it would actually take to make it happen, cost, time, feasibility, and the critic, who stress tests it for flaws and risks. Each room has one job, and you're not allowed to defend the idea in the critic room the way you might have in the dreamer room. The discipline of separating those conversations, rather than letting them collide in one messy discussion, is what makes it work. It does require everyone to agree the rules of engagement upfront though, because it's an unusual instruction to tell a room full of people we're only looking at what's wrong with this today.

Simpler ways to force the shift on your own

Not every situation needs a full workshop model, so we talked through some quicker, individual versions too. One I use often is asking myself what would a grownup do, or more usefully, what would a specific person I respect do in this situation. When your own thinking is stuck, borrowing someone else's lens, even just imagining how they'd approach it, can unlock a perspective that wasn't available to you a moment ago.

Another version is thinking about stakeholders directly. I do this a lot with teams: who are your stakeholders, and what would they actually be saying about you right now if they were in this room? I ran this exercise recently with a team in the open source software space, and they proudly told me their community would say they really care, that they're doing the right thing. Good answer. Then I asked what, given their strategic objectives, that community actually needed to be saying about them. The answer was completely different: that they were driving and forcing change. Neither answer was wrong, but the gap between them was exactly the kind of thing perspective shifting is designed to surface.

Gemma brought in a lovely coaching tool too, sometimes called the inner boardroom or inner team. Rather than trying to silence your inner critic, you place that voice in a room alongside other voices, more supportive ones, ones based on how you've actually been observed to perform, and let it speak in the context of the whole room rather than on its own. A related trick that works well for almost anyone is asking what advice you'd give a colleague who came to you with the exact problem you're facing. People can access genuinely good answers for someone else almost instantly, even when they're completely stuck on their own situation.

It's a muscle, not a personality trait

The thing I'd really want leaders to take from this is that perspective shifting is a discipline you can build, not a fixed trait some people have and others don't. It does connect back to self-awareness, noticing when you're less willing to step into a different view, and choosing curiosity over judgement anyway. And to be clear, this isn't about being wishy washy or abandoning your own thinking. It's being able to say this is what I think, and also genuinely explore it from somewhere else, without losing your own position in the process.

Worth a listen if...

You want a couple of proper models, Six Thinking Hats and the Disney Creative Method, for structuring group conversations so they don't get stuck in one perspective.

You're after quick, individual tools for getting unstuck when your own thinking has hit a wall.

You're curious about the gap between what your stakeholders are currently saying about you and what they actually need to be saying.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.