Chapter 5
Seeing A New Way Of Seeing

O brave new world that has such creatures in it.

—William Shakespeare

When Richard Stallman spoke to researchers at IBM in the 1990s, he must have seemed like a drop-in from another planet. The bearded MIT hacker who founded the Free Software Foundation was invited in to speak about his radical ideas on software development. In his "GNU manifesto"—which created the foundation for work on GNU, an open-source alternative to the UNIX operating system—Stallman envisioned a world in which "everyone will be able to obtain a good software system free, just like air."¹

The problem was that Microsoft, IBM and other companies had built their software businesses on a very different model. Their software was not open, but proprietary. That meant that the source code was developed by internal programmers and locked as tight as a safety deposit box. Sharing software was the same as stealing it, a point that software companies hammered home in their licensing agreements and through the pit-bull growls of their attorneys. The company that sold the software held the code, and users paid for licenses for every breath of this "air." At the point when Stallman made his first presentations, even the "crazies" in IBM's research labs couldn't see a way to build a business model around this extreme view of open source. It was a totally foreign model.

"We had been following what he had been doing ever since I was in research," said Daniel Sabbah, Vice President of Application and Integration Middleware Development at IBM. "But there was no business model."

At the same time, IBM researchers recognized the benefits of the open-source model. The software was created by a community structured as a meritocracy, in which developers competed to add source code and users fixed bugs so that the system was self-correcting. Distribution was easier because it was free, and the community that created it helped to spread it. IBM continued to watch this new development and think about it.

Ultimately, this radical idea would transform the way IBM approached its software development. The shift came as IBM was fighting an uphill battle to market its Domino Go software for Web servers based on a traditional proprietary model. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft had captured more than a quarter of the HTTP Web server software market, while IBM had only about 2 percent—a serious concern for a company that was increasingly building its future around e-business. But while large companies battled it out on proprietary server software, an open-source alternative called "Apache" had quietly captured about half the market. The open-source model had moved from a radical idea to a force to be reckoned with, and IBM had no choice but to pay attention. "The horse was already out of the barn," said Sabbah, who is a Wharton Fellow.

Yet, the next act was far from certain. The company could have dug in its heels and fought for the old model of proprietary software. Instead, it transformed its entire thinking about software development. IBM developed a less extreme open-source model than Stallman's, allowing for the creation of a profit-making business model. Still, the biggest challenge for IBM was overcoming legal concerns. The lawyers objected, "If you don't control it and don't own it, we don't want to do it." They pointed out that, as a deep-pocketed player, IBM faced significant risks by climbing into the sandbox with the open-source community. Instead of accepting the objections as a reason to reject open-source, open-source proponents within IBM engaged in rigorous due diligence about licensing agreements and even the origins of the code.

IBM developed a business model based on building more advanced software and service contracts on top of the open-source code. Apache creates the "ecosystem" in which IBM and other companies can build their businesses. Apache creates a standard foundation for the house, making it easier for IBM to build the roof.

"The biggest objections were legal objections, and there were business risks. But in order to be a viable business, you take risks and sometimes those risks pay off," Sabbah said. The move to Apache also meant walking away from investments in IBM's proprietary Web server project. "If you are going to love every single one of your children to the point that you never give them up, you are not going to have a successful business," Sabbah said.

It turned out to be a win-win situation for both IBM and the Apache project. IBM contributed equipment and programmers, giving the open-source project added credibility and the service support to increase the comfort level of large clients. At the same time, IBM now had solid software and an easy distribution platform for basic server software, which was never going to be a high-margin business anyway. By early 2003, Apache was running on more than 60 percent of all servers² and IBM had launched other successful open-source-based projects such as WebSphere and Eclipse.

How did the recognition and transformation to this new model take place? First, the research division was constantly looking for new ideas.

"We have a vital and vibrant research division," Sabbah said. "And they listened to us 'crazies.' "

The project also had support from the company's leadership, people like Sabbah's boss, Steve Mills, "who ran interference with the critics and was actively egging me on." It also helped that IBM had such a small position in the proprietary market that it had little to lose. Still, there were many opportunities for second guessing along the way, as they bet a significant part of the business on this new model.

"Now, you tend to forget all the isolated times along the way when you wondered if you were right," Sabbah said.

How To See Differently

Most of the time we ignore so much of the world around us. We are sleepwalkers in our own lives, relying upon crib sheets and lecture notes in place of the full spectrum of experience. We walk throughthe world and don't pay attention to it. We see without seeing. We quickly classify others as "others" and don't see them as individuals. We classify new ideas as "crazy" and don't give them a second thought. We tread the same old paths and don't look to the left or right. Like the magician's daughter Miranda in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, we are prisoners of our own islands of thought until some foreign intruders come to our shores. Then we realize the wonder and perils of interacting with this "brave new world" outside the scope of our former mental models.

How do you cultivate the ability to see things differently? How do you remove your own blinders and come up with new perspectives? How do you take these perspectives seriously enough to transform the way you see the world, but not so seriously that you lose touch with your past or your current reality? How does a company like IBM adopt an open-source mindset without losing its focus on making a profit? This chapter examines a variety of approaches to broadening your thinking.

• Listen to the Radicals. You need to be able to listen, as IBM did, to the radicals and look for the wisdom and opportunities within their "bizarre" ideas.
  Although Canon President and CEO Fujio Mitarai is the nephew of one of the company's founders, he has a reputation for thinking very differently than his Japanese peers.³ After working 23 years for Canon U.S.A., Inc., he was able to blend Japanese and American approaches to business challenges, so he was neither a gaijin (foreigner) who would be rejected out of hand nor a traditional Japanese executive. This hybrid approach helped Canon bring radical ideas and approaches into the executive office and achieve record profits at a time when its Japanese peers were faltering.
  Who are the radicals in your world and what are they saying to you? What are they seeing that you don't see? What can you learn from them? Is there some wisdom in their ideas, and how can you bring it into your life in a way that won't appear quite so bizarre to those around you?
• Embark on Journeys of Discovery. At age 22, Charles Darwin embarked aboard the HMS Beagle on a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. There were other sailors aboard, but Darwin was the only one who saw the journey through a distinctive perspective. For the young man, this was a journey of discovery and adventure, a rite of passage, a coming of age, a nineteenth-century scientific "grand tour." To spend five years of his youth sailing around the world was a stupendous investment of time and energy. From the Amazon jungle to the now-famous Galapagos Islands to the Blue Mountains of Australia, sailing across vast distances in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, Darwin was exposed to an unbelievable number of new experiences.
  Beginning his Beagle voyage as a doubting creationist, Darwin subsequently became a firm evolutionist. His training as a geologist had left him pondering the conflicts between the creationist view and the geological evidence. The Beagle voyage and its associated expeditions and scientific activities gave him an immense amount of stimulation and intellectual material. He was a powerful observer and kept meticulous and detailed notes of just about every experience. A combination of keen observations and novel experiences provided Darwin with raw material for his subsequent grappling to make sense of what he observed. This whole process yielded one of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements—evolutionary theory.
  Interestingly enough, Darwin never left Great Britain again after returning from the Beagle voyage, but because he was open to the experience, his mind was stretched in ways that not only transformed his own thinking but also transformed scientific theories more broadly.
  It is not just where you go but how you see the experience that counts. Darwin would have been merely a tourist had he not recorded and thought deeply about his new adventures. Beyond that, if he hadn't brought a Western scientific perspective to his travels, he might never have extracted new insights from them.
  Journeys that could offer new ways of looking at the world might be into new lands but also could be into areas such youth markets or video gaming. Listening to the emerging segments of consumers, employees and investors can offer fresh perspectives on your organization or industry.
  Where do you need to travel to see new ways of seeing? What journeys of exploration can you embark on? In what places are the new ideas emerging? What perspectives do you need to bring along to make sense of what you are seeing?
• Look Across Disciplines. The University of Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology has produced many leaders in the field of biology, with a dozen Nobel Prize winners including DNA pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick. Part of the genius of its original thinking was that the lab "welcomed researchers who wandered across disciplines and then encouraged them to interact closely."³ This interdisciplinary reach and collaboration has made the laboratory a center for a series of key advances—from identifying the structure of myoglobin and other proteins to developing a method for making monoclonal antibodies.
  Similarly the legendary medical treatment of the Mayo Clinic is based upon the insights of teams of physicians, facilitated by a culture, an incentive system and interactive technology that support collaboration. The organization pulls together the expertise it needs from various perspectives and clinic sites to address a patient's specific problems.³
  Part of your own familiar territory is your education and training, and you can make new discoveries when you cross these borders. Education and training create communities that have an approved way of seeing and understanding the world. This shared view makes it easier for community members to work together. Doctors have a common mindset and language that facilitates working with others within their professions.
  Medical doctors and chiropractors, on the other hand, live in separate universes. They often don't have this common education and training, so they inhabit separate, and often mutually exclusive, worlds.
  A student of physics or medicine will approach the world in a very different way than a student in the philosophy department. How often will these two be found conversing with each other? Eventually, in fact, they may lose the common language they need to communicate at all. As the two students pursue doctoral degrees, they may become so immersed and concentrated in their respective disciplines that they actually inhabit separate worlds. One of the perils of specialization is this isolation.
  Some of the advances in physics or medicine, however, have a direct impact on philosophy, and vice versa. For example, researchers are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other scientific tools to assess brain activity while addressing ethical dilemmas that have long been a concern of philosophy. With genetic research and other innovations, many of the breakthroughs in biology depend upon computer science or engineering. Biology has been transformed in the process. Its approach, once very "soft" and qualitative, has become much more "hard" and quantitative. But these types of connections will only be recognized if the students have access to one another's worlds.
  While business schools have historically been organized based on academic disciplines (such as management, marketing, finance, etc.), management problems cut across disciplines. The Wharton School has reshaped its MBA program to create a much deeper interdisciplinary approach. Today's students are empowered to develop more creative solutions to problems by looking at the same challenges from multiple perspectives.
  A lot of the progress in different fields is at the intersection of other disciplines. How can you cross the boundaries of your education or practice to see the perspectives from other parts of your organization or other disciplines?
• Question the Routine. Like ocean waves against the beach, routines can lull you to sleep. How did the corporate boards of Enron and other companies that experienced corporate disasters miss the glaring problems in front of them? Like many organizations, they had a certain routine or cadence that took the place of active engagement in looking at their own mental models.
  Board meetings can become a predictable and formalized process that is repeated each time the board assembles. It is a ritual dance and the CEO leads it. The steps are well rehearsed, and the board has little choice but to follow. Unless someone is bold enough to question the process itself, the routines take on a life of their own and tend to block out active questioning.
  Research on marketing—for both industrial buying and individual consumer purchases—shows that we are often on autopilot in making our buying decisions. Consumers usually engage in a "straight rebuy" decision. You might like a particular type of instant coffee and, having settled on that brand, you don't look at anything else on the supermarket shelf. There is no decision. You walk by, find the product and drop it into your cart.
  Marketers have spent quite a bit of time trying to find ways to break through these patterns and encourage consumers to try alternatives. Some consumers have a natural proclivity for "variety seeking" and like to try new things just for the pleasure of it. But most of us need a good reason to try something new. If our traditional product is not available, we are forced to try something different. For example, if you are in another part of the country or the world where the product selection is different, you will need to look at alternatives. Or if the risk and investment in the decision are increased somehow—for example, if you have to buy coffee for a small army—you might look more carefully at price and other factors.
  Routines and cadence are important in the life of organizations and in your own personal life, but you need to be alert for times when they might lull you to sleep. Are you vigilant enough? What are you taking for granted? How are other people handling similar routines?
  You can also break your own routine deliberately to force yourself to look at the world differently. Try experimenting with your own routines—from the way you structure your day to your path into the office to your interactions with colleagues or family. Be aware of the new insights you gain. If you take lunch at that same place and time every day or hold a regular staff meeting that has become tired and predictable, make a simple change in your routine. Companies that took the simple step of introducing "stand up" meetings, where employees gather together but don't sit, found that this fairly simple change made the meetings shorter and more focused, altering their whole character.
  You need to pay attention to how much you pay attention. Be aware of when you and your organization are on autopilot. If you think about it, you probably know how it feels. Engage in the exercise presented at the opening of the chapter to quiz yourself about simple aspects of your environment. Are you really paying attention? Are you awake to the possibilities around you? If not, do something to disrupt your routine, even in a small way.
• Recognize the Barriers. You also need to be aware of those around you who prefer that you don't reconsider your decisions and current models. In marketing, the "in" supplier in a straight rebuy decision is making every effort to make you feel comfortable and reinforce this automatic behavior. The "out" supplier, on the other hand, is trying to challenge you and make you modify your behavior.
  In accepting a model, ask yourself about the motivations of those supporting or attacking it. Particularly if you are surrounded by defenders of the status quo, you will have a much harder time moving in a new direction. In the rise of open-source software, the lawyers may have been much more committed to the idea of proprietary software, and this became an added obstacle to adopting a new way of seeing.
  What barriers in the world around you lock you into your current view? What inhibitors and blinders keep you from seeing new models? How can you overcome these obstacles or look over these fences to the world beyond?
• Practice "Flying Upside Down." Routines are reinforced by education and training, but this makes you less prepared for outlier experiences. Airline pilots, for example, were routinely trained to fly under normal conditions and even to deal with a range of expected problems, but they didn't have the experience of adapting to serious malfunctions such as the plane losing control or flipping over. Airlines are expanding the range and accuracy of simulations to adapt to the wide range of "loss of control" events, which were identified as the second highest source of airline fatalities, ahead of fire, sabotage or collision.⁴
  A NASA-funded study tested how prepared first-year pilots were to deal with eight loss-of-control crash scenarios that were deemed recoverable. While the young pilots were able to recover from the problems they had been trained to deal with or that had straightforward solutions—such as wind shear or nose-low spirals—they were unprepared to deal with six of the eight more difficult scenarios. The best responses to these problems often conflicted with the recovery techniques for problems with a similar feel but very different causes. For example, the generic solution of "powering out" of a stall by using a nose-high attitude may be the wrong technique if the cause is due to an icing situation. Airlines and government officials are looking at expanding the range of pilot training and the accuracy of flight simulators in presenting more diverse scenarios.
  What are the equivalents to "flying upside down" in your personal life or career? How can you prepare for events that are far outside your normal experience and require different responses than "flying upright"? How does your current education or training prepare you for these events? How can you expand your education or thinking to see these outrageous scenarios and prepare for them?
• Engage in Gradual Immersion. Gradual immersion is an important principle in absorbing a new mental model. It takes time to get used to a new way of looking at the world, and sometimes you have to follow the logic from the old world to the new. Consider the work of modern artists such as Ryman and Reinhart, who created monochromatic canvases. Many visitors to museums look at these works and shake their heads. They figure they could easily have painted something as good. This challenge is explored in the successful play ART, which is centered on reactions to a totally white painting.⁵
  If you can follow the progression of artwork from the realistic to the abstract—through the many stages of development of contemporary art, particularly the evolution of conceptual and minimal art—the white canvas begins to make sense as part of this evolution. You begin to train your perception to be able to see how this piece of art fits into a broader story and so it makes sense—not from the perspective of your instinctive reaction but from the perspective of your new knowledge. It is an acquired taste, like drinking scotch.
  For a new model that appears as inviting as ice water, how can you gradually immerse yourself to slowly adapt and better understand it?
• "Destroy" the Old Model. While you ultimately will create a portfolio of models, sometimes you need to "destroy" the old model to make space to see the new one. "Idealized design," pioneered by Russell Ackoff, starts with a desired state and then works backward to the steps necessary to bring the world from its current "mess" to that state.⁶ For example, one morning in 1951, the head of Bell Labs assembled all his top researchers and told them the entire telephone system in the United States had been destroyed overnight. He said: We have to design it from scratch right now. He challenged the researchers to fill the void. Once they recovered from the shock—and realized that he was neither telling the truth nor joking about the destruction of the current system—they began to fill in this blank page. Out of that challenge to see the world differently came innovations such as the Touch-Tone phone, Caller ID and cordless phones.
  What would happen if you set aside your current model? Without the burden of these "legacy systems," what could you create in their place?
• Envision Multiple Futures. Scenario planning, popularized by the work of Royal/Dutch Shell and many leading practitioners, works from the other direction, examining the trends and uncertainties of the current environment and the way these drivers might play out in a set of potential scenarios for the future.⁷ For example, in the IBM software case, there might have been a scenario at the start of the open-source movement in which the whole world moved to open-source and another scenario in which the movement failed to take off and software remained largely proprietary. At that point, no one knew which direction the market would go, so rather than betting everything on one model or the other, scenarios allow managers to plan for different worlds that might emerge.
  What are the potential future worlds you might live in? What mental models will be needed to succeed in each of these future worlds?
• Take a Devil's Advocate/Contrarian Perspective. Creating a formal process entailing a "devil's advocate" or "contrarian perspective" can encourage different ways of seeing and bring them to the fore in organizations. These alternative views of reality are often suppressed as a result of pressures such as "groupthink." By creating a role of "devil's advocate" (a term which, surprisingly, came out of the Catholic Church), we can encourage the expression of these contrarian and even heretical views without the proponents having to fear torture for blasphemy. For every major new proposal or mental model, appoint a specific person or team to represent the opposing view. If someone proposes X, the devil's advocate will argue for "not X." In this dialectic and debate, the strengths and weaknesses of each model can be explored more fully, and new models might emerge.
  How can you create a devil's advocate role in your organization and in your personal life? How can you raise such questions in your own discussions to surface new ways of seeing the world?
  In addition to these approaches, paying attention to the weak signals from the environment and creating early warning systems (discussed in "changing horses" in Chapter 3) and the use of post-mortems to learn from past mistakes (to be considered in our discussion of R&D of the mind in Chapter 7) are also valuable in generating new ways of seeing. The strategies for addressing "adaptive disconnects," to see the world through others' eyes or bring them around to your view, as we will discuss in Chapter 9, can also help in "seeing a new way of seeing."

New Maps

The strategies described in this chapter can help you find new ways of looking at the world, but you still are challenged to know when to look seriously for new models. It took a lot of energy to set out on the journey of discovery that Charles Darwin made in the HMS Beagle. It took great time and energy for a company like IBM to put structures and business models in place that allowed it to embrace open software. You can sometimes recognize the need for this type of change by paying attention to the parts of the world that no longer fit your mental models and that help you see when your models no longer work. If you think about optical illusions, before you make the shift from one view to another, you usually focus on specific details of the picture—which then lead to a shift in view.

New models very often emerge from a crisis. Yet if you keep an open mind, become more aware of the limitations of your existing models and actively set aside time to explore other models, you can recognize the need sooner and respond more quickly and effectively in seeing a new way of seeing. If you keep a set of different models at hand, you can try out different ones in solving problems, experimenting with new approaches to see if they might work better than your existing ones.

Endnotes

1. Stallman, Richard. "The GNU Manifesto." GNU Project. 1993. <http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html>.

2. February 2003 Netcraft Survey Highlights." Server Watch. 3 March 2003. <http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/1975941>.

3. Holstein, William J. "Canon Takes Aim at Xerox." Fortune. 14 October 2002. p. 215. Kunii, Irene M. "What's Brightening Canon's Picture." Business Week. 21 June 2002. <www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2002/tc20020621_9093.htm>. "Hard to Copy; Canon." The Economist. 2 November 2002. p. 79.

4. Pennisi, Elizabeth. "A Hothouse of Molecular Biology." Science, 300 (2003). pp. 278–282.

5. Berry, Leonard L., and Neeli Bendapudi. "Clueing In Customers." Harvard Business Review. 81:2 (2003). pp. 100–106.

6. Croft, John. "Taming Loss of Control: Solutions Are Elusive." Aviation Week & Space Technology. 157:9 (2002). p. 50.

7. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: Knopf, 1981.

8. Ackoff, Russell. Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

9. See, for example, Schoemaker, Paul J. H. Profiting From Uncertainty: How To Succeed No Matter What the Future Brings. New York: The Free Press, 2002.