What you don't see can kill you.

I was being driven by my elderly father some years ago. At a certain point, it got rather exciting: we missed a parked truck by a couple of inches. And that is when I realised his eyesight was starting to go: he really had no idea what I was so agitated about. It turned out that he had macular degeneration. With a hole in each retina, his brain was taking content from his peripheral vision and pasting it across the holes. He saw blurry street views where in fact there were trucks. My mother and I did the driving after that.

I thought of this several times this week. Jean Todt angrily denying that Formula One was becoming boring (and wondering why anyone wanted to invite Max Mosley to a meeting); Microsoft writing off nearly all of Steve Ballmer's Nokia acquisition; Anthony Jenkins losing his job at Barclays. In each case, it was clear to me that gifted, extremely competent, valuable and experienced people had fallen victim to the perspective trap.

The perspective trap makes a top performer the victim of their own strength. They become so confirmed in the strength of their vision that they lose track of what they are not seeing. Whether it is the market as a whole (in Ballmer's case), or the people around you (Todt and Jenkins), you can be sure that others have a different perspective from your own. Lose sight of that and you are driving straight into the back of the truck, because those with a different or wider set of perspectives will have the drop on you.

In my experience, the most powerful way to protect a leader from this hubristic fate is not, as you might think, to get them to tone down their perspective. Rather it is to map for them, in some detail, the shape of their own perspectives, as compared to other people. We certainly look for the under-utilised levers within those individual perspectives; but essentially the job is to help them understand what their perspective is - in the context of all possible perspectives. 

And that makes it much easier for the leader to build the right alliances with those who see things differently, and whose complementary vision can lead to a more rounded, and accurate, view of the world.