Taking Multiple Perspectives

Definition

Nearly everyone acts from a story in which their own behavior is reasonable, even honorable — "each person is the hero of her own story." Taking multiple perspectives means deliberately constructing the story a confusing or opposing person might tell about themselves, one that makes their actions look sensible and even good from the inside, instead of building a story that just confirms your own view of them as wrong or malicious. Done seriously, it is effortful and has to be checked against the trap of building a "stupid person's stupid argument" that secretly still flatters your own position.

In the Book

The book develops this through Doug's reaction when a local pastor, Reverend Welcher, publicly calls for Yolanda's resignation and accuses her agency of corruption. Doug's instinct is fight — cast Welcher as an enemy to be defeated. Yolanda reframes: "we don't need to defeat the enemy here... we're on the same side... we just need to figure out why he might have said what he said." The authors generalize this into a practice — list every player touching your issue, then deliberately construct the honorable version of the story for the one whose motives seem most inexplicable or bad. They invoke Gandhi, Mandela, and King as leaders whose power came not from out-arguing opponents but from understanding the fears and dreams even of those "oppressing them" well enough to build bridges with them.

Later in the book (Chapter 4) this habit is extended into the polarity map: when two sides of a genuine paradox (e.g., long-term versus new employees, centralized control versus local autonomy) can't be resolved into one right answer, gathering multiple perspectives on both poles — rather than picking a side — is the only way to manage rather than falsely "solve" it.

Why It Matters

The instinct to sort people into allies and enemies collapses information you need: the reasoning behind behavior you find confusing or threatening. Reconstructing the other side's internally coherent, "heroic" narrative — even when you disagree with it — recovers that information and turns a standoff into a relationship you can actually work with or learn from. This is a domain-neutral move: it works as well on a hostile stakeholder as on a dissenting team member or a competitor whose strategy looks irrational until you model their incentives.