If you’ve seen my keynote on the “Past, Present, and Future of Customer Experience,” you’ve heard me say that “perspective taking” is one of the most critical skills for leaders to build in 2025 and beyond. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, “perspective taking” is what psychologists call seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
Unfortunately, human beings aren’t great at perspective taking. We can want to. We can practice. We can try. But we’re inherently limited by what we already know, what we’ve experienced, and what we believe to be true about people and the world (primal beliefs).
Thankfully, there’s a way to be better. All it takes is changing a single word.
Instead of “perspective taking,” switch to “perspective getting.”
What’s the difference? Perspective takers assume. Perspective getters ask.
Psychologist Nicholas Epley introduced the concept of “perspective getting” in his book “Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.” He deemed it critical because we all suffer from a condition called “mind blindness.” We can never truly know what is happening inside another person’s head.
I was reminded of this idea recently while I was reading our February 2025 book club selection. Author Charles Duhigg’s research confirmed that “perspective getting” is the approach taken by exceptional communicators around the world. These “Supercommunicators,” as Duhigg calls them, know that even people we think we understand have inner lives we are simply not privy to.
Take me, for example. Many people don’t realize that I have a background in software engineering. I haven’t written a line of code in 25 years – by choice – but the engineering mindset is core to who I am. Trying to guess my perspective on anything without taking that into account is risky. At worst, you’ll guess wrong. At best, you’re likely to miss something big.
What don’t you know about the customers, colleagues, executives, and partners you work with?
What strategies do you and your team use to help draw out their true perspective?
Here are three questions that I find particularly useful for this purpose:
1) What do you already know about [topic]? Ask this so you can tailor what you say to their existing level of expertise. I’ve had times when people were far less exposed to an idea than I expected. Other times they knew much more. If I’d assumed a basic knowledge level, I ran the risk of seeming arrogant or condescending.
2) What part of this [program/project] is most interesting to you? I often ask this during stakeholder interviews. People often have interests and passions that aren’t part of their core functional job. Knowing those helps us craft an engagement plan that takes advantage of intrinsic desires to work on something we already like.
3) What makes you say that? This is a great question to ask when someone makes comments that feel critical or put you on the defensive. Instead of replying with all the reasons they’re wrong, ask this question to see if there are experiences or data points that you aren’t personally aware of. The things they base their opinion on may be wrong, in which case you can politely set the record straight. It’s just as likely their comments came from a place of bias or personal dislike. In that scenario they’ll struggle to answer the question, thus exposing how they really feel without even saying a word.
What strategies do you and your team use to help draw out their true perspective?
