Stage-6: Welcome Alien Ideas

Applying Perspective-centred Principles

You are a respected leader or manager within a thriving business, yet sooner or later you will face challenges that are beyond your division's or organization’s present capacities and efforts.

You will have succeeded to this point by being diligent, intelligent and pragmatic. Even your charisma and panache are bedded in the tried and true. If new or intense challenges require new thinking from you, then that is best handled by recognizing and respecting perspective-centred principles.

The needed principles and dangers are described in detail here. However, this is the Perspective-centred story in a nutshell:

You are unlikely to be perspective-centred yourself, simply because relatively few people are. Read more.

However, if you are and that is your primary mentality, then you are most unlikely to be a CEO. The dynamism required in a business, as well as the risks to be taken in that role, would be far too great for you to feel comfortable. As a perspective-centred employee, you will prefer to be in an analytic and advisory role. You will be sought after if the CEO has reached this Stage in their development. An entrepreneurial CEO who is secondarily reality-centred will certainly be pleased to have you working for them.

Note that the requirement here is to draw on relevant values, not to take on the mentality wholesale. So with determination and willingness, it is certainly possible for primarily cause-centred and community-centred individuals to function well here.

You should be able to move yourself and any organization you lead to the forefront of your sector. You should be able to extract the best from latest thinking, while being well-positioned to resist faddish extremes that periodically sweep the business world. You will probably have come across systems thinking and been attracted to ideas like:

● Inter-connectedness
● Scenario planning
● Strategic intervention
● The learning organization

You will feel most comfortable if you can establish a headquarters devoted to policy-making, supported by good people in high-level intelligence and research functions—one or two of whom might be perspective-centred if you seek them out.

You will find it worthwhile developing relationships with a number of consultancy groups or personal advisers whom you can use in precise, time-limited and cost-effective ways.

Overwhelmed with Complexity?

A diverse multiplicity of mind-sets, experts and alternatives can be too much of a good thing. What you really need to grasp is the single strategy that will tackle the situation and in which people can believe and focus their energies.

The perspective-centred Mode, being a realm of abstraction, multiplicity and neutrality, does not help much.

You have tried using various methods, e.g.Closed you may have created or become part of a sophisticated knowledge-cum-intelligence apparatus to master technology, operations and markets via scenario planning and creativity techniques. But this usually extrapolates the future from the recent past. Possibilities of profound discontinuity have either been denied or treated more as an exercise to indulge consultants than as an immediate reality.

The only solution is to step back and come down to earth, cut through complications and commit to a fateful course that will drive the business forward to success amidst uncertainty and complexity. But how?

Fortunately there is a Mode that takes you into the future at every moment, and it alone allows and expects success. It puts facts and theories, people and pressures, politics and competition and more into the correct context. But it involves using reality-centred principles.

Originally posted: July 2009