Spinning your wheels looking for an innovative solution to a persistent problem? Tired of butting heads over a given issue time and time again? Doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Maybe the solution is as simple as changing your point of view. Find out how to use this simple tool to get breakthrough results.

What Is It?

Changing Points of View is an exercise that enables people to look at a problem from a new perspective.

This is a great unblocking tool. Use it when a group or team is stalled.

Use It To

• Bypass boundaries that are blocking solutions to a problem or that seem impossible to overcome.
• Understand the point of view of other team members.
• Prepare for a meeting with someone who has a different point of view.

The problem-solving process appears to be better at seeing things that are wrong or not working rather than the things are working well. This tool makes use of this preference.

Variations

• Changing perspectives: seeing the problem from another's point of view.
• Double reversal: approaching a problem when the negatives (why a proposed solution won't work) are easier to identify than positives, or when conventional thought seems to hinder progress.

How to Change Perspectives

• Pick the point of view of the person or persons you want to understand, write down what that person might say, think or feel.
• Consolidate all ideas on a flipchart.
• Clarify and edit.
• Discuss and record follow-up actions for the ideas you've generated.

How to Do a Double Reversal

• Identify the goal.
• Write the goal in reverse of the original intent.
• Rather than thinking about how to make something work, think about how to prevent something from working. (This is a single reversal technique.)
• Identify the ways in which reversal can be attained.
• Reverse the suggestions. (This is the double reversal.)
• Review the new list for useful ideas.

Example: Double reversal

A team is stuck, and it faces the problem of how to improve the sales level of hotel rooms to prospective customers.

The team leader reverses the problem and asks “How could we keep our rooms empty?”

There's often a lot of laughter and fun in the absurdity of looking at the negative. This can energize the group.

• Take all day to clean the room.
• Not allow people to enter the room.
• Make the room rate too high.
• Never clean the rooms.
• Make them unattractive and shabby.

Now the group is keen to find absurd ideas.

Next ask the group to reverse the ideas and see what they have.

• Quickly clean the room.
• Make the rooms available all the time.
• Lower the room rates.
• Always have clean rooms available.
• Make the rates extremely attractive.

This is a simplistic example. However it demonstrates that the team can come up with some ideas that can be pursued to improve their availability way before they become stuck.