The Value Of Being An Outsider

In honor of launching the eleventh batch of d.leaders into their diverse and varied partner organizations in our flagship course, "Leading Disruptive Innovation," I wanted to make a short case for the value of an outsiders' perspective. If you have the time for "the long case," pick yourself a copy of Dave Epstein's exceptional, "Range," which does the job very nicely.

As I said, I'd like to make a short case, and I'd like to do it by pointing to a crucial inflection point in the history of the twentieth century. The fantastic "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age," describes in vivid detail the paradigm that dominated most experts' thinking about computers, and the individual whose insights revolutionized what we thought a computer could do, who it was for, and why we might want to use it:

"The history of the digital computer up to then was that of a glorified calculator. A mainframe taking up half the floor of a large office building could run a payroll, balance the books of a billion-dollar corporation, calculate in split seconds the optimum trajectory of an artillery shell or a manned spacecraft aimed at the moon. But it was a mute self-contained machine that received its questions via teletype or stacks of punch cards and delivered its answers in the same way.

"'The notion of a human being having to punch holes in lots of cards, keep these cards straight, and then take this deck of what might be hundreds and hundreds of cards to a computer... You come back the next day and find out that your program executed up until card 433 and then stopped because you left out a comma. You fix that and this time the program gets to card 4006 and stops because you forgot to punch an O instead of a zero or some other stupid reason. It was bleak.'

"(Bob) Taylor perceived the need for something entirely new. 'I started talking functionally,' he said. He asked himself: Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain? Obviously, the eyeball. If one the contemplated how the computer could best communicate with its human operator, the answer suggested itself. 'I thought the machine should concentrate its resources on the display.'

"The computer traditionalists goggled at him. Most were mathematicians or physicists and thus perfectly content to employ calculators the size of cement trucks in quest of the next prime number. In 1968, when he and his mentor, the eminent psychologist J.C.R. Licklider, published an article entitled 'The Computer as a Communications Device,' the kind of interactive display he was talking about would have consumed memory and processing power worth a million dollars even if limited to the size of a small television screen.

"'It took me a couple of years to get them to come around. The designers said, the display? That's crazy, the display is peripheral! I said, No, the display is the entire point!'"

That whole passage is filled with fascinating stuff, but the point I wanted to mention is simple: the keepers of the guard, the experts of the field, their thinking was constrained by conventional wisdom, shaped mostly by their own specialized needs. Despite their pedigrees and subject matter expertise, it was almost impossible for them to imagine a different paradigm.

To Taylor, focusing on the display was "obvious." I don't know about you, but it wasn't totally obvious to me what the answer to the question, "Which organ provides the greatest bandwidth in terms of its access to the human brain?" is, even though I'm on this side of the personal computing revolution. But it was to Bob Taylor. Why? Because he did his masters at the University of Texas at Austin in sensory psychology, "the study of how the brain receives input from the senses."

What was an unfathomable leap to the keepers of the conventional wisdom was obvious to an outsider. It's almost impossible to predict that Bob Taylor's particular training would be particularly relevant to shatter the existing paradigm, but it's almost certain that the breakthrough had to come from outside.

And that's really the benefit of the outside perspective: the ability to see what the keepers of the conventional wisdom can't. Whether from outside the field entirely, or simply from outside the establishment (which is the case in perhaps one of history’s most under-appreciated outsider stories, Albert Einstein, who was reduced to accompanying his applications to high school teaching positions with a self-addressed envelope in hopes of receiving a reply, of which he received hardly any, even years after his graduate studies in physics were completed), an outsider's perspective is incredibly valuable. It's why consultants exist; and therapists; and coaches.

So d.leaders, don't worry if you don't know the industry. That's the point. You're particularly well-suited to help because you don't. Now, don't lose your objectivity!

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