“Why would anyone think they’re smarter than everyone?” — Chief Operating Officer 1
One of the central insights to have emerged from 35 years of helping organisations create future-fit entrepreneurial cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is none of us ever sees the whole picture in any situation.
Even my iPhone knows this.
Or at least its predictive text function completes the above phrase after the first four words.
And the only reason it doesn’t do it after three words is that it also “knows” none of us is as smart as all of us.
Of course, it doesn’t really “know”, in the human sense, either of these things.
It’s just that I type both phrases quite often, so after the first few words there’s a good chance it can predict what’s coming next.
What my iPhone cannot know, until Apple provide it with a much more substantive artificial intelligence capability, is that the former insight — none of us ever sees the whole picture in any situation — when put into practice, is what brings the latter insight — none of us is as smart as all of us — to life, turning it from rhetoric into reality.
That’s why my work revolves around the central theme of the 2D3D mindset.
A 2D3D mindset recognises that no one — no matter how experienced, exalted, or expert they may be — ever sees the whole of anything.
Each of us only ever has a biased, partial and one-sided 2D perspective on a 3D reality that none of us can ever see in its entirety. 2
Even when Einstein came up with relativity theory, he didn’t see the whole of reality.
What he did was come at physics from a different angle, bringing a different way of seeing that enabled him to see what no-one had seen before. 3
Curiosity and respect for different 2D perspectives on an inherently unknowable 3D reality is at the heart of a future-fit culture.
Yes the Hollywood image of the individual white-coated genius toiling away in the lab until the eureka moment strikes is mostly made up.
In the real world, many more breakthroughs stem from multiple people combining their respective perspectives.
That’s why the primary role of senior executives is to create organisational conditions that enable, encourage and empower diverse people to explore, share and combine their individual, biased, partial, and inevitably incomplete 2D perspectives.
Future-fit entrepreneurial organisations are built on a foundation of 2D3D mindsets — the deeper and more widespread the better.
Fortunately, people develop 2D3D mindsets naturally and automatically as soon as the penny drops that none of us ever sees the whole picture in any situation.
When you operate from this mindset and another person sees something you don’t, it’s clear to you that they’re seeing aspects of the situation you’re currently missing.
It’s not that they’re mistaken, misguided, or as mad as a box of frogs.
They just look like that when you’re trapped in your own 2D perspective…
The 2D3D mindset is simple enough to understand in theory.
That no-one is as smart as everyone.
That more of the collective capacity for value creation gets unleashed when people who work together genuinely value each other’s different ways of seeing.
But even though it’s simple to understand, it’s not always easy to practice.
The default human setting is to be internally critiquing what others are saying against your own perspective, mentally “correcting” what you see as the “errors” in theirs.
You may even be doing it as you read this…🙂
It’s well worth developing the capacity to look beyond what appear to be the flaws, faults, and falsehoods in the differing perspectives of others.
Doing this not only reveals new insights that were previously hidden, it also strengthens relationships and builds mutual respect, both of which help innovation, agility, and adaptiveness to thrive in practice.
As my iPhone already knows…
A frustrated former client commenting on his senior executive peers. Unfortunately, his attitude is the exception to the general assumption amongst senior executives that they must be smarter than everyone or they’d not have got to the top…
In December 1999 The Financial Times published a feature article on the 2D3D thinking tool I’d developed in my work helping clients create future-fit cultures since the late 1980s . Find out more about the mindset and the thinking tool in this six-minute video.
Einstein’s breakthrough was easier for him than his more famous physicist contemporaries Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. As an outsider to the mainstream physics community Einstein wasn’t so wedded to the 200 years of established Newtonian orthodoxy on which the other leading physicists’ illustrious careers were based. See Einstein - His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster 2007 (p133).