A leader can learn a lot about perspective by visiting The Bean in Chicago. The sculpture, known formally as Cloud Gate, could be best described as a giant reflective bean.
Visitors to Millennium Park will see crowds around The Bean. People love to stare at sculpture’s surface and see its distorted reflection of reality. It’s a different perspective of our normal world.
Think of it like a giant funhouse mirror. The perspective, which is captured in countless pictures, helps you see a different version of yourself and the world.
Have you ever looked at yourself in a way that made you look overweight and then decided, at that moment, that you’re going to start a new exercise routine?
People like to imagine possibilities and new perspectives empower us. Art like The Bean stimulates our minds. We like this kind of growth and development.
These things are true, until we enter the workplace. Something happens, on the job, that narrows our focus to just what we know and just what is in front of us.
This becomes apparent when an organization is resistant to change. “Sure, things haven’t been going well,” people will say. “But why change now when we’ve always done things the same way. We don’t need any new ideas.”
You’ll have a hard time finding a sculpture that’s devoted to keeping things the way they’ve always been. My guess is that it would be a monument to failure. On second thought, these do exist and are represented by closed offices and empty factories.
If you want to be an effective leader, consider how welcoming you are of new ideas. If your goal is to improve productivity while also increasing profitability, then why not consider a different perspective?
This kind of exercise may confirm that an existing process or procedure is still useful or that it just needs some adjustment.
Had people not embraced change, then I would be writing this document on a typewriter and copying it with carbon paper. Those tools worked well but now are outdated.
Find your version of The Bean, whether it’s a “what if” conversation with your team, discovering how other industries are changing, or deciding to bring in an outside point of view. A different perspective can be invaluable.
