Paradigm shift anyone?

This is the famous “View from 9th Avenue” by Saul Steinberg. It has been ripped off many times featuring other cities such as Paris or London to portray the closed off views that people are prone to. I am fascinated by paradigm shifts, the radical change of a person’s or a society’s views. Trying to make changes happen in order to get your message across can take massive effort and many years and yet the moment of change will take place almost in an instant – take the Fairtrade movement or women’s rights as examples.

I’m always trying to find ways to help people communicate in a way that will relate to another person’s point of view and I’ve recently started using “View from 9th Avenue” as a tool in communication workshops. It is excellent for helping people ‘walk in the other man’s shoes’ and it works surprisingly well for internal communications challenges as well as external ones. And it is a fun creative session, so great for running in the ‘graveyard slot’ when everyone is trying not to fall asleep after lunch.

So far I’ve found two applications – I’d be interested if anyone can see anymore.

Seeing someone else’s point of view.
If a team or a department are having a hard time making themselves understood, you can use this image to help them understand where the other party is coming from – and is really non-confrontational. Get people in pairs or groups to visualise themselves or their department as the little strip of land in the distance (the bit marked China/Japan/Russia), and draw it on a piece of flip chart paper. They then have to draw the picture from the other person’s point of view. What would be the oceans? What would be the landmarks? What are the things closest in view? Get the groups to present back to each other and then bring people together in a larger group and invite suggestions and ideas about how to reframe their approach. Most often the ideas will be about highlighting in communications – how departmental requests will ultimately solve a problem for the person being asked, or make their job easier.

Getting rid of the obstacle.
The way it works is to get people in pairs or groups to draw their own work landscapes with the end objective visualised as the little strip of land in the distance, they then ‘back-fill’ by drawing all the stuff that stops them seeing the objective clearly. There is usually a lot of energy at this point because everyone will be enjoying the moan about problems – it’s a good way of getting this out of people’s systems in a controlled way. The solution is then for people to draw a road to the objective that successfully navigates the obstacles. Of course if this is a session that turns up real monster blocks, then you can design the workshop to have breakout sessions at this point and give a challenge to each group to work on.