The view from above

I read another great piece in Ryan Holiday's daily devotional text, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living the other day.  I thought it was worth sharing.  He started out with a passage taken from the book Meditations by the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher-king, Marcus Aurelius:

"How beautifully Plato put it.  Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's-eye view and see everything all at once - of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings, and divorces, births, and deaths, noisy courtrooms, or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markers - all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites."

What is Marcus Aurelius trying to say here?  The data scientist and blogger Ranjani Mani suggests, "Step back, zoom out and look at life and what it offers from a larger vantage point. Despite how difficult that seems to sound in implementing, I believe this helps figure out the trivial from the important."

It's amazing what happens when we take another look at things from a new perspective.  I've certainly talked about how two different individuals looking at the same event from two different perspectives can come up with vastly different interpretations of that event (see "HRO: Reluctance to Simplify"), recalling to mind the famous effect in cognitive psychology known as the "Rashomon Effect" (the name of the effect is based on a 1950 Japanese movie Rashomon in which the plot device features different characters providing alternative and contradictory versions of the same incident), as well as the 2008 movie, Vantage Point, starring Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, and William Hurt.  Just as important, when we view the same event or issue from a "bird's-eye" perspective, our interpretation of the event or issue changes as well.  We look at the event or issue in an entirely new and different way.

The astronaut U.S. Navy Captain Edgar Mitchell, who as the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14 was the sixth person to walk on the moon, once said after looking at the Earth from outer space (see my post "The Blue Marble Project"), "In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."  

Just look at the way that the Earth looks from outer space - indeed, it looks like a beautiful, big blue marble.  Seeing the Earth in this way gives a new perspective (it's called the "Overview Effect") - there are no longer any boundaries or borders between countries.  All you can see is one Earth - united in all its beauty.  There are no differences from this viewpoint, only similarities.

We can take a similar approach when we take a more global, bird's-eye view of issues we face as leaders.  Changing our viewpoint will force us to change our perspective, and changing our perspective often leads to discovery of new and different ways to tackle a problem.  Ryan Holiday ended his devotional with, "Many a problem can be solved with the perspective of Plato's view.  Use it."