In the System Thinking world, and I will primarily be leaning on the work of Pete Senge and Daniel Kim, there is this systemic process of five distinct levels of perspective:
- Vision (Generative)
- Mental Models (Reflective)
- Systemic Structure (Creative)
- Patterns (Adaptive)
- Events (Reactive)
Book Reference: Organizing for Learning: Strategies for Knowledge Creation and Enduring Change
Many of us are familiar with this outline, but I seldom see it discussed in sales and marketing circles. I believe it is a fundamental concept that should be discussed by this group. All five levels are even important to address in most selling situations. Of course, we live in an event—orientated world, and most of our efforts will be directed in that area. In research, it has been found that 80 to 90% of our actions are indeed either reactive or adaptive. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing. I mean if you are about to get run over by a car, we do not need to be thinking of what we might look like afterward, we might want to be reactive and get out of the way and adapting a little to find the shortest route.
The highest leverage action that we can take is determined by the level of perspective we are at in a given moment. It is important for sales and marketing to understand at what level their customer is at or even more specifically the level the person they are communicating with is at when they are positioning their product or service. It sounds very simplistic, but it happens more than what you think. For example, if you communicate to tactically minded people future rewards and to upper management the ease of use – you got it backward.
It is worth noting that as we go down the levels, our calls to action should deliver quicker value. The challenge is to choose the correct response for the present situation or person. Understand what they value, and their scope of concern and even influence can be understood better if we understand their level of perspective.
In the sales process, when working with multiple people in a purchase decision to be the most effective we have to think of the different levels and position our message accordingly. Keeping in mind that feedback is very important as new information, changes in any of these perspectives can cause changes in others. How many times have you seen during a sales process different problems or goals surface and you wonder how you ended up here? I would even caution to be careful not to mix too many different or the extreme levels of perspective in the same meeting. This has always been a problem for me in workshops for example.
It is also important to remember that the process of gaining deeper understanding is not a linear one from events to vision. Our understanding of the situation at one level can feedback and inform our where to spend another level. The events in patterns, for example, can cause us to change systemic structures and can also challenge our mental models. To be most effective, we must consider the full range of levels carefully, and we must resist the tendency to work in only one or two levels to the exclusion of the others.
The question that surfaces is how do we know what level of perspective the person is at? The easy answer is the more tactical the question, the more event-driven and the more strategic, the more visionary. It is also can be role-orientated with the users of the product and move towards upper management. Both are typical guidelines but also listen to the questions people ask:
- Vision (Generative): How does this align with our plans?
- Mental Models (Reflective): Why do we believe this occurs?
- Systemic Structure (Creative): How will this be adapted to our organization? Who else does this effect?
- Patterns (Adaptive): What happens this from re-occurring?
- Events (Reactive): How does it solve this problem?
Getting everyone on the same page may not have anything to do with the page. It may be that the room is just not viewing things from the same perspective. A quick experiment is to separate the same level of perspectives for a Q or Brain Storming session or even vice-versa. Which one do you think would give you better results?
Is this sounding a lot like Kata?