Observations on Perspective and POV
Considering the following examples has me musing today on the ramifications of small differences in points of view.
1. In 1992 I was sitting in a movie theater with my younger son, when suddenly the world tilted and fell. I had ‘lost my balance’ completely (cause: neurological). It did not return. Over the next several years, I re-learned balance, or most of it, from scratch, the way that a stroke victim does. I rented a portable wheelchair long enough to have paid for it at least 20 times over. My refusal to purchase it was an expensive act that was symbolic of my determination to eventually overcome the need for this aid.
Needing the wheelchair also meant needing a friend or family member to push it around on any excursion. It was a surprise to discover that, no matter who my ‘driver’ was, every one of them did the following. Upon spying something that they wished to investigate more quickly and easily than could be done with me in tow, they’d say, “Wait here a sec …I’ll be right back.” and park me facing a wall. Neither their relationship to me, nor whether they had experience with or an affinity for taking care of others, seemed to have any bearing on this behavior. I could make book on it. Initially frustrating, it finally became humorous.
2. I don’t like insects. I’d rather deal with a temperamental stallion or play with a snake than confront insects. I’m in awe of anyone who can pick up a live spider and carry it outside. Therefore, if I spy a spider or such, and someone else is present, I naturally ask them if they would please deal with it.
Insects have a talent for blending in. When I point to one that is not in an easily describable place, my companion of the moment will look in the direction of my pointing …from wherever they happen to be in the room. A common first response is, “Where? I don’t see it.”. When I suggest that they move to my exact position they might pause and hesitate. A natural response is often something like, “I can see perfectly well over here, just as well as you.”. This comes as often from people who are perfectly comfortable with close physical proximity in different circumstances.
The first example is more about learning empathy and the second about how we create barriers for all kinds of subconscious reasons. What examples like this illustrate to me, though, is that we often resist seeing each others’ exact viewpoint. For one thing, how to do so is rarely as obvious as, say, wearing a blindfold for a couple of days to gain more understanding of a family member who is blind. More relevant, I think, is our fervent devotion to our own view, our personal space, and our belief in ourselves.
The fact that one’s best friend or spouse sees things from a slightly different angle can easily be one of the most wonderful things about our relationship with them. My thoughts here are more about how we can better understand and communicate with those outside of the small handful of our immediate personal relationships.
In group psychotherapy, it is common practice to have each member describe their unique view of a conflict or situation. Doing this verbally and in a free-form manner has many specific benefits.
Conversely, in gathering business information, from focus groups and consumer product testing to political polling or surveying community needs, we almost invariably use an interviewer tool that is designed to break the responses down into manageable categories, making the resulting data easier to manipulate. This approach is further refined by medical and scientific researchers.
In terms of really getting to know and understand one another’s POVs, though, in communities or marketplaces, a brief written description of what each interviewee sees when presented with a situation or theory or product, can be more productive in a very different way, often introducing new and surprising components. Discovering, for example, what someone expected to see, spent time searching for, and didn’t find, can sometimes be more important than how much they liked what was there.
My wheelchair experience reinforced for me the importance of avoiding the assumption that others will notice what is obvious to you.
October 27th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
That’s such an important technique to use in really understanding how someone comprehends or uses a product or service, or even sees the world generally. Knowing how others think (or thought) and perceive things has to be the key to learning from history, relationships, marketing, education, pretty much everything.
Yet so many ‘customer service’ surveys and exercises rely on bland one-size-fits-all Likert scales or similar rather than really asking participants what they think. A handful of actual anecdotes about how something made people feel, or how they understood something, can be worth so much in developing a real understanding, but because these aren’t easily ‘measurable’, they’re so often disregarded and we miss finding out things that others notice which aren’t obvious to us, instead choosing to mess around within the same old boundaries we defined before we even started.
Your experiences with the wheelchair are very common, from what I can tell. As well as being left facing against a wall, so often, indeed, people in wheelchairs are routinely ‘talked over’ rather than ‘talked to’; it’s possible that lack of eye contact is a major part of this (e.g. in the “Does he take sugar?” syndrome).
When working on a new type of wheelchair drive, I tried a partial solution in allowing the attendant to stand and walk alongside the person in the chair rather than behind (where he or she would have to lean over to talk); Dean Kamen’s iBot takes a better approach of allowing the person in the chair to raise him or herself to the same height as everyone else, though this requires a lot of technology.
As you say, the barriers (and categories) that we arbitrarily create or adopt to define ourselves and others, are perhaps also the barriers that prevent us from really understanding and engaging with so many things (and people) in life.
October 27th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Hi Dan,
Thank you for the thoughtful comment and also for adding links to excellent examples.
Dean Kamen (iBot developer) should be on every budding entrepreneur’s list of role models. His motivation is to create things which he believes should exist, rarely backed by any substantial market research. Looking at his creations, one understands that their existence derives from the man’s view and understanding of others’ perspectives. This is so far removed from the typical business or entrepreneurial product development based on what ‘we think is cool’ and ‘confirmed by extensive market research’ as to be almost in a foreign language. Here’s one more link, to a profile of Dean in Wired back in 2000. The value of understanding through individual anecdotal experience indeed.
Your discussion of issues for those in wheelchairs, including the eye-level one connected to another related life experience for me.
I’ve an affinity for all animals, and a particular repetitive experience with large dogs. Being barely over 100 lbs at 5′7″, I’m likely to be knocked flat on my back by a boxer or rottweiler who is happy to see me and simply coming up to my level to say hello. Knowing this, I greet those ‘friends’ by crouching to their standing eye level, so that a nuzzle doesn’t necessitate their front paws hitting my chest. They often decide that it is a new game in which I’d better get ‘down’ faster than they can come ‘up’.
What is notable about this to me, is that each and every owner of these dogs, including a very experienced and well known trainer, had never seen a human do it before.
I can’t be the only person whose primary approach to others is to try to comprehend their pov, but these examples do tell me that it isn’t a very common approach.
It would appear that the barriers between us all as individuals are not only numerous, but barely acknowledged. Addressing very specific ones, through enabling better communication with and for the wheelchair bound, for instance, is both practical and laudable.
My own wish beyond this, would be for more ‘let me try to understand what it’s like to be you’ exercises and behavioral tools for all of us, children and adults alike. I believe that we are all halfway there when I observe how much many of us invest in showing and telling others about ourselves.
As you say, also, such an approach is a valuable key in all learning processes. If I listen to the words in which knowledge and learning are conveyed, I get one view, but when I attempt to imagine the full experience through it was acquired and/or developed, my understanding expands considerably.
Vera