Leonardo da Vinci commented: “There are three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who don’t see.” To which class of people do you belong? Chances are — and not only statistically — that you don’t belong to the seeing class.

Leonardo da Vinci believed that in order to fully understand something one needed to look at it from at least three different perspectives. Da Vinci’s principle of the three or more points of view (POV) is the essential core behind Perspective Shifts, a meta-exploration tool that every creative thinker or businessman ought to have in one’s arsenal. The word perspective can be defined as “point of view” or “a particular attitude toward something, or a way of regarding something.” Perspective shifts means that you need to make an effort to notice other POV aside from your own particular attitude toward a subject under consideration.

Generally speaking, you can apply this meta-tool of a creative thinker by following three steps: Firstly, clarify your current perspective from which you look at the situation. Secondly, take some time and make an effort to identify other perspectives. Thirdly, look if the alternative viewpoints lead to new, possibly surprising insights. Now let’s look at strategies as to how you can apply perspective shifts when exploring a business challenge or an ambiguous situation that you face.

1. Use multiple perspectives

This is the basic form of a perspective shift in line with the three steps described above. We illustrate it using the following example. Let’s imagine you are the owner of a Thai company with high exports, and I asked you to reflect on the recent rise of the Thai baht. Your current view might be: “The strong baht is a threat to our firm’s profit margins from our exported goods and might endanger the survival of our firm and jobs.” Alternative viewpoints here might be “We need to subsidize Thai exports or manage the THB appreciation” (a quick fix solution popular with politicians), or “Foreign exchange risk can be hedged to protect or lock in the prices and margins from exports” (a typical banker’s POV), or “It is normal and healthy for an economy that mediocre companies that have failed to invest in modernization, R&D and innovation in good times may perish in bad times” (as an economist might argue in the tradition of Schumpeter’s creative destruction paradigm).

Now which perspective is right here? The answer is: All of them. It depends on your POV, your background, your interest and motives. Important lesson: For most situations in life, there is no one-and-only correct way to look at the situation. So in exploring a business situation, drop your fixation on your current viewpoint. Instead, flexibly consider different perspectives by asking “How else can we look at this situation?” (or: “Who else is involved here and how might they see the situation?”).

2. Switch or reverse perspectives

A variant of our first perspective shift is to switch or reverse your perspective. In our previous example, let’s switch to the viewpoint of a foreign importer: He is indifferent about the appreciating Thai baht, as he pays our Thai exporter the same price in USD (or another foreign currency). It is of no concern to him that the export proceeds translate into fewer baht for the Thai exporter due to the baht appreciation.

3. Shift between the big picture and small picture

Another important perspective shift that you always should consider is looking at both the small picture and the big picture involved in a situation. First make your POV more global or abstract; then more narrow and specific. If you start from a big picture perspective, then try to separate the parts from the whole.

4. Look at what is there that you have not noticed yet (vuja dé)

Finally, a very interesting perspective shift is to look at what is there that you fail to take notice of. A prominent example for this perspective shift is the current sub-prime crisis. Renowned economists already warned many months ago that the US housing market is overheating and many mortgages might default if interest rates rise. However, the warning signs were ignored until the crisis broke.

Tom Kelley has popularized the term vuja dé (the opposite of déjà vu) to describe situations where you have a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before. For example, when I was working on the design of the THINKERGY logo, I was incubating for days on how to visually infuse more energy into the sun logo. One evening, I saw a lady sitting opposite me in the BTS with an amulet in the form of a spiral — bingo, that’s the missing element. I rushed home to draw the new sun logo design with the spiral, and to my great surprise, I suddenly noticed spirals all around me in my home: on the coffee mug on the desk, in two art paintings in my living room, on the cloth basket in my bathroom — spirals, spirals, spirals all over my home that I failed to notice… Vuja dé. Lesson: always ask yourself: “What is it that we don’t see here, although it has been there all the time?”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2008. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the title “Perspective shifts: How else can you look at your situation?” on 28 February 2008.