More on Principles & Dangers

• Widen your learning and make an effort to get exposed to new and alien ideas lying outside your own intuitions and philosophies. Then practice looking at things in these new ways.
• Such learning is time-consuming and may be stressful and expensive. (However, getting stuck and stagnating in a thinking rut is worse.)
• Grasping and accepting the validity of new fundamentals does not require you to become a fully-fledged expert in these alien approaches. However, you will have to temporarily (at least) identify with the new mind set.
• You will only be able to tap diverse sources when the time comes, if you start preparing yourself in advance and make the effort to assimilate new ideas.
  

• When everything obvious has been tried and your usual approaches do not produce results, or if it is not at all clear what is going to work, then the time has come to think differently: but such thinking must be thorough.
• You will be unable to put any proposals into practice if you cannot explain them convincingly to colleagues and to staff.
• A radical investigation is not something that you can just assign to a colleague to handle with a top-class consultancy firm. If you do not genuinely embrace the new thinking yourself, the resulting advice will be incomprehensible and the expensively commissioned report will be unreadable.
• Ideally, you should be seeking for win-win-win outcomes from inquiries: benefits for the business, benefits for individuals/departments and benefits for customers &/or wider society.

• Sometimes a new perspective can be provided by someone in your own organization. More often, you must look outside for a specialist consultant to help you re-think.
• Different consultancy services bring different ideologies to bear and apply different models.
• To put your own biases into perspective, you need to view different, yet seemingly valid, analyses and strategies that are proposed with great conviction by different advisors.

• The results may not always be welcome but, if you can lead the process effectively, you will find that there are always alternatives to your usual way of going about things.
• Radical long-term strategies or major unconventional innovations will founder on resistance flowing actively from those who lose out and flowing passively from the inertia of custom and practice.
  

• By respecting and supporting the distinctive knowledge and theoretical orientation of your advisers, internal and external, you may be able to gain access to a richness of resources.
• You can only get the best out of others if you genuinely value freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry and freedom of belief.

• Once you can bring yourself to respect and value knowledge that is intrinsically alien, you must let it operate freely. That means using that framework to carry out systematic, unbiased investigations and then to analyse impartially.

• Possibly without knowing it you will have been proceeding successfully in line with a particular perspective. The more aware you are of your guiding assumptions and value-systems (ideologies/paradigms), the better.
• If things start going wrong, the time may have come to recognize the need for deeper inquiry or altered effort that starts from a new point of view.
• Changing perspective is not an admission of failure but a sign of freshness, and a willingness to reflect and learn from events.
  

Entering new realms of thought when you have to be a bottom-line-oriented person is fraught with hazard because situations can be needlessly and endlessly intellectualised. It is like the paralysis of analysis, only worse.

Thinking something through using disparate contradictory and alien perspectives can lead to arguments about what the implications are, and to all-round confusion.

Tapping diverse sources may entail using Consultants who, while rarely towering intellects, will certainly know enough to make you feel relatively inadequate and helpless. Not all will refrain from exploiting their position.

Exposing alternatives, whilst moving against convention and group pressure to maintain the status quo, can introduce complications that compound the confusion of thinking things through.

Respecting autonomy can encourage everyone to be more self-assertive and this can have a fragmenting effect in relation to plans and joint working.

Analysing impartially with the aid of expert investigations can be problematic because such findings are impersonal and depersonalise the organization by ignoring political factors, ingrained habits and conventions.

Shifting perspective as required by failure or new thinking is likely to cause destabilization even when it is obviously required, because it upsets the assumptions and expectations of staff.