My office window gives me a reassuring view of the weather.
If I can see blue sky and the trees are not moving too violently, I conclude that it is a perfectly good day for cycling.
Ten minutes later, halfway up the road and being hit sideways by rain, I reconsider the quality of my analysis.
I blame the British weather.
Stella blames my decision to treat one small window as the national meteorological service.
The view was not wrong. It was simply incomplete.
Amber suggested the window for the sixth and final piece in this series. We have now worked our way through the fridge, doorbell, recipe book, thermostat and mirror.
I am beginning to suspect she has been turning our house into a leadership programme.
Stella would prefer her to move on to the vacuum cleaner.
Windows help us see what is happening outside our immediate space. But every window has a frame. It shows us one direction, from one position, at one moment.
The danger begins when we forget the frame is there.
Senior leaders look through dashboards, board papers, forecasts, employee surveys and presentations reassuringly titled “Transformation Update.”
From that window, the new system has been implemented, the process is working and the programme is green.
Then you spend time with the people doing the work.
They are entering information into the new system, copying it into the old spreadsheet and maintaining a handwritten list because neither system quite reflects what actually happens.
From the boardroom window, implementation is complete.
From the frontline, somebody has added another job.
Both views may contain accurate information. They are simply describing different parts of reality.
The senior leader sees control. The team sees delay. Finance sees compliance. The customer sees another form asking for information they provided last Tuesday.
This is why leaders so often become frustrated when people do not understand the bigger picture.
Occasionally, the people understand it perfectly well. They are simply standing somewhere that reveals a different problem.
It also changes what people are willing to show you.
Bad news rarely travels upwards in its original packaging. Each layer removes something sharp, adds context and changes “this is not working” into “there are some opportunities to optimise adoption.”
By the time it reaches the top, the building may be on fire, but the presentation says the temperature is creating valuable learning.
Leaders then say, “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
Sometimes nobody did.
It may also be worth asking what happened the last time somebody tried.
Looking through another window requires more than visiting the frontline and asking a few questions. If people explain their experience and we immediately tell them why they have misunderstood it, we have not listened.
We have conducted leadership tourism.
Curiosity means allowing the possibility that another person’s view may alter our own.
Artificial intelligence can help widen the window. It can bring together patterns from performance, communication, customer feedback and employee experience far faster than any leadership team could manage alone.
But it can only analyse what we make available.
Feed it board reports and it may become an extremely articulate member of the board. Feed it carefully sanitised data and it will produce a beautifully reasoned version of the existing blind spot.
AI does not remove the frame. Sometimes it makes the frame harder to notice.
Six household objects later, the same problem keeps turning up.
We become so busy keeping, answering, following, heating, diagnosing and measuring that we stop noticing the human reality directly in front of us.
It is about noticing more, listening before defending and being willing to change your view when reality gives you a good reason.
AI can help us see more information, more quickly. In the hands of an emotionally mature leader, that can create curiosity and better judgement.
In the hands of an anxious leader who already knows they are right, it may simply help them be wrong with greater speed, confidence and supporting graphs.
I asked Stella what she thought the six blogs had taught us.
She said:
“Throw away what we don’t use, stop interfering in everything, follow a recipe occasionally, turn the heating up, take a good look at yourself and clean the windows.”
I explained that this was a rather literal interpretation of a carefully developed leadership series.
She said it was still the most useful action plan I had produced.
Six blogs later, I am forced to accept the same uncomfortable truth.
Sometimes the perspective you need is standing behind you, wearing a fleece, wondering why you still haven’t listened.
