Broadening Perspective To Understand Context

My model for creating the most successful collaborations starts with, knowing your value, maximising existing opportunities and understanding the context in which you currently and/or wish to work, all before being connected to others. The first step to expand our impact.

Understanding the context in which we are working is important, as is understanding the context in which we would like to work and collaborate. The situation in which we have created our business, how we develop ideas and so on will vary. This is our context.

I believe that before you can fully understand the breadth of the context in which you work, or others work, you need to step outside your familiar surroundings, see what else is going on and look back in.

It’s very much like my 2-month visit to India 20 years ago. I got to experience first hand the things I had only been exposed to through the media or family tales. I had to adjust to the higher level of noise, stray animals, using different transport and navigating the culture with sensitivity. I come face to face with a level of homelessness I could never imagine and an array of unfamiliar things which drew out curiosity and questions. At times I was fearful but I also felt pleasure like I had never known, experiencing a culture, a core part of my own heritage and so much difference for the first time. Then, on returning home, I saw my own context differently, influenced by new learning and widened perspective.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, psychologist, talks about how nobody else sees us the same way that we do. I feel it is therefore reasonably fair to say that others don’t fully understand the context in which we are working unless we can show them. They won’t see the things we see. I also observe that we do not fully understand our own context if we only see things from our own perspective. If we can find ways to take a step out of our frame of reference into the space others gather and then gaze back in, what might we discover?

This approach of stepping out of our own shoes into the shoes and perspectives of others sounds easy. But, particularly in the case when we are trying to look at our own situation through the lens of others it can be tricky. How do we stop being influenced by what we already know? How can we achieve this wider perspective effectively?

On a practical level, I believe we best achieve this when we talk to people we don’t usually talk to, we explore new places and get lost! This could be anything from going to events we don’t usually go, through to visiting new countries and experiencing new cultures. If you are currently working in the retail sector but have a curiosity to work in transport. Get out there, see how others view the retail sector to better understand your own context and then go mingle with people in transport. Be curious.

Our context is more than our current situation. I believe the context in which we work is enhanced by our background, where we have come from and all that we have done. When we start to explore and broaden our perspective and insight, we also maximise the learning from our own journey to date. The things that are familiar to us are not the norm for others. This insight is invaluable as we build our next steps to expand our impact.

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