?? From A Distance ??
“From a distance, you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance, I just cannot comprehend
What all this fighting's for”
-Julie Gold, “From A Distance”
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.
I mean, who didn’t?
Going to outer space seemed like the coolest job in the world, although training to be an astronaut would have gotten in the way of my other professional ambitions of being a guidance counselor, baseball player, nursing home head, and President of the United States (yes, I wrote an essay on “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up” including each of these jobs).
Alas, I hate going upside down.?And when I found out that astronauts spend a lot of time?training upside down , I was out.?Another thing?President Barlett ?and I have in common (I also don’t like?green beans ).
But I remain fascinated by space.?The size and scope of the universe beyond Earth make me remember how small I am in the grand scheme of things.?And that brings us to this week’s big idea…
The Overview Effect
Frank White clearly got over this fear of going upside down.?How do I know this???Because White actually was an astronaut , and after already having one of the coolest occupations in the world, he created a second career that is equally fascinating: space philosopher.
One of White’s great intellectual accomplishments is “the overview effect ,” the idea that “astronauts…and space settlers…have a different philosophical point of view as a result of having a different physical perspective.” When a person has the privilege of seeing the world from space, they will see things differently when they return to Earth.?Kind of like?The Dead Poet’s Society?from hundreds of thousands of miles away…
Initially, White’s motivation in focusing on the overview effect was offering a philosophy of why the United States needed to continue space exploration following the explosion of?The Challenger.?Over time, White expanded the overview effect’s value to other areas of human flourishing.?In particular, White argues that the overview effect can have a profound impact on how humans treat one another:
“...the first thing that most people think about when they think about the overview effect is no borders or boundaries on the Earth. And we know that. But we create maps that show borders and boundaries. And what the astronauts were telling me was, I, I knew before I went into orbit, or went to the moon, that there weren't any little dotted lines. But it's knowing intellectually versus experiencing it…we are really all in this together.”
In?Parashat Shelakh Lekha,?ten of the spies ?famously tell Moshe that “we looked like grasshoppers” in the eyes of the current inhabitants of Canaan.?Regarding this statement, the?Rashbam argues ?that “anything low considers itself as like a grasshopper when compared to something much taller.” In the case of the Israelites, seeing themselves as low like a grasshopper was a cause for trouble; in our world today, perhaps all of us would be better if we recognized how small we are in the grand scheme of things…
No matter our background, leaders of organizations are simply trying to power through whatever challenges their community faces this day, week, month, or year.?And yet given the opportunity to zoom out to the extreme, those challenges can seem quite small.
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Leadership on the Line
I’m not sure if there are two thinkers who impacted more leaders in the Jewish Community than Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s concept of “adaptive leadership.”?I have no data to support this claim, but the sheer number of leadership programs that use adaptive change as a guiding concept is tremendous.??Some leadership ideas you read about are mere trends without much substance behind them, but Heifetz and Linsky continue to resonate because they write clearly and offer powerful tools anyone can grasp.
For our purposes, teaching about the overview effect is the perfect opportunity to look at one of their key concepts in?Leadership on the Line, “getting on the balcony.”?In any situation, Heifetz and Linsky argue that some people are?on the dance floor , in the middle of the action, and some people are “on the balcony,” asking “What’s really going on here?” The first step of adaptive leadership is getting on the balcony and seeing things from a different vantage point.
In this sense, the overview effect and getting on the balcony are similar; at the same time, a crucial difference exists between the two. While Heifetz and Linsky argue that “Achieving a balcony perspective means taking yourself out of the dance,” eventually a leader “must return to the dance floor” to affect what is happening. As a result, a balcony perspective demands distance, but not too much distance.?In contrast, the overview effect is distance to the point where you can no longer see the challenge at all.
This makes me wonder how the idea of balcony space and the overview effect could interact with one another.?Regarding the overview effect, how many figures do you know in the Jewish community who are likely to be mentioned in the equivalent of a Jewish history textbook 500 years from now??The minute we remember that almost all of us are quite small in the grand Jewish story, we see the challenges of today differently.?At the same time, for those who need to get on the balcony, how much balcony space is necessary to see a situation differently, and how high up can one go before they become out of touch??In this sense, great practitioners of leadership are calibrators of distance, because knowing how to see things from different vantage points is the way we ensure that new insights continuously emerge.
The Edge of Mind
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