The Importance of Looking Up

I once had a Wheaton terrier named Bayker. He remained a puppy his whole life. He’d be in the backyard, and I’d look out the kitchen window and watch as he raced delightedly back and forth across the width of our property, busy running like there was no tomorrow. Then, suddenly, he’d stop and sit down. Paws neatly, regally nestled in front of him. Erect and stately. And he would look up. Yup. He’d just sit there and look up. Quietly. Calmly. Now and then turning his head from side to side. And then, he’d stand up, give himself a good shake, and sort of saunter back over to the house.

Looking up: I was fascinated to watch him. What the heck was he looking at when he was looking up? Once in a while, I’d carefully inch my way over and kind of settle down alongside him and look up with him. Gradually, the thought came to me:  When do I look up? And when I look up, what do I see — or even think to look for? Do I look up enough? And so — don’t laugh — over time, I began to look up more.

Change can be difficult because the busier we get (running back and forth), the less inclined we may be to (sit still and) look up. To be efficient, and a lot because of sheer habit and routine, we can fall into the day-to-day embrace of what have become deeply ingrained and unexamined siloed processes, siloed ways of thinking, siloed goals, even siloed teams. Our desire to hunker down and “get things done” can inhibit us from reality-checking our impacts on each other, our customers, the bottom line, and yes ourselves as well. “The way we do things” can anesthetize us — even validate us — to such a degree that the way things need to or could be can get totally lost.

Why look up? You can see across. You see more broadly — outward, not just inward. You can see more of the “whole,” and being able to see more of the whole brings vital information and animates the direction and purpose of what is happening — or needs to happen — when you look down and in. Systems thinking and customer-centered design are two examples of powerful strategic frameworks (ways of thinking) that enable us to look up for organizational health, relevance, and change.

The courage to look up: It does take a bit of bravery, to be honest, and a good dose of curiosity to look up from what we are doing and ask: Are we doing this right (is there a better way)? And, why are we doing this (should we be doing this?). Has our purpose changed? Do we need to rethink the goal we set a year ago — even six months ago — because we detect new information that suggests changing course would be smart — or conceivably imperative.

The courage to speak up: And then, if you and perhaps several of your colleagues have the courage to look up, are you in an organizational setting where exploring new information, sharing what you see, and inviting others to see what you see is “OK?” Are you and others encouraged to introduce fresh perspectives and ideas? To suggest, perhaps, that we “change the way we’ve always done things”?   

Integrated Product Teams are designed among other things to answer these kinds of questions as part of the change process. IPTs aren’t “just” for software development. They bring together people from multiple disciplines, and hence people with a diversity of perspectives and experience from across the organization to define and work together on a project. They can include staff members from engineering, IT, marketing, HR, and procurement, for example. Sometimes IPTs are stood up for a short period of time and then, upon completion of their work, they disband while another IPT might engage in a more far-reaching or longer-term innovation. IPTs are adaptive, and by their nature work at the edge of what is possible. Their mission is, in fact, to look up, share what they see, and based on their results and learnings, create change and integrate the benefits of their work back into to their organization.

Do you see what I see? Translation: Share the vision. Leaders who look up and out develop a vision for the future of their mission and share what they see every time they have a chance to connect with their team and their stakeholders. Great leaders have a way of bringing what is outside into the organization and making what they see part of their team’s awareness and lexicon, so that you can talk with almost anyone on the team and essentially hear the same thing — different words, likely, different ways of speaking for sure, but that kernel of “what we all see” is there.

Look up to bring the outside in. My crazy terrier Bayker didn’t give a whit about change — but I learned a good lesson from him about the importance of looking up.

Nina is the Change Management Practice Lead at the consulting firm LMI where she also serves as a Senior OCM Consultant supporting government clients in the planning and implementation of a wide variety of change efforts.  She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Fellows in Change Management Program and the Change Management Advanced Practitioners (CMAP) Certification Program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and is ProSci trained.  She holds an MS in Organization Development and an MA in Communications.   

Image courtesy of pixabay.com