Pondering Same play, two hours, four verdicts
What you see depends on where you're sitting. A theatre, seven seats, and the one view you can never get on your own: the view of yourself.
Opening night in a grand old theatre. In the front row, a group of critics scrutinising every move. A few rows back, a family whose kids are giggling at the clown. Up in the balcony, a young couple watching a story about love and sacrifice. Right at the back, teenagers throwing popcorn.
Same play. Same two hours. Four completely different verdicts, and every one of them honest.
Organisations work exactly like this. A change lands, and the executives in the box seat, the managers in the wings, the staff on stage, the customers in the house and the people on the street who never came in will each tell you a different, true story about it. Most of us only ever hear one or two of those stories, and we usually hear our own the loudest.
Walk the seats, street to stage
The Vantage Point blueprint is one map of one theatre with seven seats on it. You walk it a seat at a time and write down what each seat is saying, in their words rather than your summary of them. And you do it in an order that runs against instinct: start out on the street with the people who read your sign and kept walking, and finish on stage with the people closest to the work.
Near the stage the detail is vivid but biased. Out on the street you get the whole shape, but no voices.
Then comes the seat everyone skips: the empty one, marked in orange. That's where you draw yourself, honestly, where you actually sit, not where you'd like to.
The gap is the finding
Once the seats are full, step back. Where do two accounts of the same event refuse to match? Who saw the change first? Who was asked last? Who's being pulled three ways? Join the seats in a second colour and label each line: a note, a consultation or a directive. The lines that only run one way, and the seats with no lines at all, tend to tell you more than any engagement survey.
Then do the part that matters. Turn one insight into one decision, with a name and a date on it. An insight that never becomes a decision was entertainment.
A question to take into this week
Think of the last change you led. Which seat did you never actually ask?
Try the Vantage Point blueprint, free
The whole of Chapter 1 is free, blueprint included. Print it as large as you can and grab a pencil, or draw on it on screen and come back to it later.
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