A Few Additional Perspectives on Perspectives

In my late teens, I once made the ill-advised decision to go to church while suffering from some sort of summer flu. It was a strange affliction - one that left me dizzy and imbalanced, as if my body's center of gravity had fled to a place just outside its own circumference. Out of habit, I opted to go, and as I stood for opening hymn, I immediately began to regret my decision. I braced myself to keep upright, but the sounds of singing began to blur and the stained glass above began to swirl as if I was looking through my childhood kaleidoscope. All at once I found myself hovering from the building's rafters, staring down at this young man who was face-down on the pew in front of him, having apparently fainted into that strange position. It was the moment when I realized that I was the young man below me that I snapped out of my stupor. I woke, hunched over the pew in front of me. I lifted my head to the perplexed expressions of my fellow churchgoers. “Good hymn,” I muttered, as my parents ushered me off, still rubber-legged, to the local walk-in clinic.

That was the only time that I've had the opportunity to see myself from a truly different point of view. And to be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed with what I saw.

When it comes to points of view, I tend to side with third-person narration, which was so popular in the nineteenth century: the all-knowing objective mind's eye, who sees into all, knows all, and provides whatever insight and oversight needed to move the narrative along.  In the novel Moby Dick, Melville's narrator Ishmael moves from his place as one of the fellow seamen to this strange position of omniscience, and hovers above, below, and inside the whaling vessel, as to let us know the minds of the characters, while taking the time to provide historic, biographic, and anatomical asides. Such narration provides the panoptic perspective that can only come from fiction. The very non-fictional narratives of the real world rarely, if ever, afford such perspectives. Melville himself praised the whale as being above man, for a number of reasons. Among them were the whale's unique field of vision, with its eyes residing on the side of his head, such that its eyes cannot physically form a unified field, but must interpret two independent observations and synthesize them internally. Such a creature was naturally, to Melville at least, superior to the two-eyed cyclops that was the homo sapiens.

Like the omniscient narrator, the scientific movement of the enlightenment sought to provide such an all-encompassing perspective of the universe. And while the contributions to general knowledge have been understandably monumental, the ability to consolidate this knowledge into a single coherent and consistent perspective has been fleeting. Even as we strive for a god's-eye view of the world, a view that is more human than human, we show ourselves to be wanting, to be human, all too human. Quantum physics, for instance, taught us that, at the subatomic level at least, it is impossible to observe an object without affecting, or even destroying it. Think of that the next time you're working in the factory and an industrial engineer comes to do a time study on you.  

Looking back at the revolutions in modern physics, brought about by Einstein and his contemporaries, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions found scientific progress to be not merely the swapping of a weak theory for a stronger one, but rather the paradigmatic shift from one entire worldview to another. Now, while Kuhn's ideas have been coopted to peddle everything from business strategy to bicycle seats, his observation itself is not without salience: better decision making and evaluation is not merely a function of better explanations, but of broader social paradigms that can affect progression from bad to better.

Speaking of the heavens, it was August of 2017 when a solar eclipse once again ran its patched eye over our good nation. I was onsite with a client, and as the afternoon approached, employees of the company were scrambling to find welding goggles with which to view the event. I happened to have a pair of glasses purchased explicitly for this occasion, and as the eclipse peaked, the team of us sauntered outside into the warm afternoon, made strangely hazy by the partially-veiled sun, unevenly lighting the land beneath us. We passed around the communal spectacles, taking turns staring up at the sun through its moon cover. And as this transpired, I thought to myself that this must be what it is to be a consultant - as consultants, we were there to provide the objective perspectives necessary to allow clients to stare into reality without burning out their eyeballs.

But that's a rather self-indulgent metaphor…

In reality, consultants, like the clients they serve, are fallible creatures, sometimes illogically wedded to our own points of view. In my years in the ERP sphere, I've worked with countless consultants and encountered as many discrete perspectives, giving the term "best practice" a rather dubious meaning. And as a consultant, I find my own perspectives modifying themselves according to the experiences afforded by each new engagement. Often, I find myself learning from my clients as much as they learn from me. As such, I've come to hold that, as consultants, the best thing that we can do for our clients is to understand the many experiences we've been lucky enough to take in, filter them and present them back to our clients, with the hope that the perspectives we've encountered can be of utility to them. I am not so na?ve as to think that as consultants we are Socratically easing our customers out of their proverbial caves and into the light. In truth, we all carry our own caves with us, and our own clearings. But when we take the things we've seen and use them to shed at least a little light on the circumstances at hand, we are hopefully accomplishing what our customers have asked of us - to help them see a little bit better, such that they can see the patch ahead, and achieve their respective visions.

 Note: this is a follow-up to a previous post I did on the Estes blog: https://www.estesgrp.com/blog/are-your-lenses-obscuring-your-vision/