The Art of Perspective Rotation

Putting yourself in another person’s shoes is crucial if you want to understand their behaviour. Qualitative research is a great starting point for this. The short version is: you can't understand a problem unless you see it with your own eyes; you need to talk to and spend time with the group whose behaviour you want to change; and you can't outsource this work to anyone else if you really want to get it.

But even after you have done your homework, the leap to a different perspective is still a difficult mental manoeuvre. A technique called ‘perspective rotation’ can help.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, describes it thus:

“By rotation, I mean taking all the sides. Whenever there are people of differing positions on an emerging topic — it could be Uber, it could be eSports, it could be 5G, self-driving vehicles, you name it.

If I find that I cannot argue from any particular viewpoint, I will book a couple of days to spend time with that community on ethnographic —just hanging out until I rotate my worldview and until I can argue from their viewpoint.”

But how exactly does this last step work? Let's illustrate with an example.

An example of rotation

Say you are the IT security manager for your company. You are responsible for getting all staff to follow good security practices: not writing their passwords down on post-it notes, for example. But you are struggling to get their cooperation. They won't attend the training sessions you organise. They keep clicking on phishing emails. You can't really understand why. It is obvious to you that computer security is important. Why would anyone leave their password taped to their computer screen for the world to see?

Sensibly, you start talking to your colleagues. They say: "We're busy, these requirements are confusing, I don't know why they're necessary, nobody else seems to follow them, I've had my password written on a post-it note for two years and had no problems, so what's the issue?"

Now you are closer to understanding. But despite knowing intellectually why people aren't complying, chances are you still don't feel it in your bones. On some level, their behaviour remains mystifying: can it really be so hard to choose a password that's not just "password"? So now it's time to rotate your perspective.

What is a requirement that feels pointless and confusing for you? Perhaps you've never seen the point in the expense report forms your finance team requires. You're busy, they are confusing, you don't see why they're necessary, and you know some people go months without filing theirs without the world ending. Now tweak that a bit further: what if you had to attend a mandatory training on filling out expense forms every year? What if your credit card was disabled if you were even a day late on your filing?

Now, using this rotated perspective, you can experience your colleagues' IT frustrations more viscerally. You can start imagining solutions, and it will feel a lot more obvious which ones are going to work. Of course mandatory expense form training would drive you up the wall. But simplifying the form might help. And if the finance team could explain (very quickly, without wasting your time) why the expense forms are needed, which bits are really important, and which bits there's more flexibility on, maybe you'd be willing to meet them halfway.

Rotation is a good counterpart to a well-calibrated problem antenna. The latter is a hunt for situations where people's behaviour doesn't make sense, where they are acting against their own interests. Perspective rotation helps you understand why their choices make sense to them. When it comes to designing good solutions, that understanding is worth 20 points of IQ.