The Creativity Suite. Episode 150: Bispective – the unique competence of being able to see something from both perspectives.
Interview with Margit Kunz, Chief Executive Director at The German-Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
A person (Person A) who has worked in an advertising agency her whole life has a lot of experience in creating advertising. She has a certain perspective on advertising. A person (Person B) who has worked in a marketing department her whole life has a lot of experience in commissioning advertising campaigns. She, also, has a certain perspective on advertising.
But a person (Person C) who has worked both in an advertising agency (creating ads) and in a marketing department (commissioning ads) has the unique competence which comes from seeing the creation of advertising from both sides.
Person C has a “bispective” on advertising.
Bispective is a made up word created by combining the Latin word for “two” (bi) with the word “perspective” where “spec” means “to observe”.
So a person who can look at a situation from two perspectives has a “bispective”.
Here are some other examples of expertise that will generate bispective:
– A sales person who previously worked as head of procurement, who can now understand how people who buy services think.
– A person who becomes a parent, and can now understand both how it feels to be a child, but also can take the perspective of a parent.
– A former lobbyist who switches sides and becomes a politician, and who can now better understand the struggles of politicians trying to make their voters happy.
Having bispective is like having two eyes instead of one. A person with just one eye loses some ability to perceive depth, and a person with just one perspective on something loses the ability to perceive depth of understanding in that area.
I learned about bispective from Margit Kunz, Chief Executive Director at The German-Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
A chamber of commerce always has bispective. They represent their home country (in Margit’s case, Germany) but they also represent the local market in which they work (in Margit’s current case “Belgium and Luxembourg).
In her previous life, Margit has worked both as a PR-person for a local theatre as well as a local journalist. By working both in PR and journalism gave Margit “bispective” on “media”.
According to Margit, having bispective gives a person many advantages:
1) You can better anticipate different outcomes, and you work on it much faster.
2) You become more emphatic towards your counterpart and can more easily see their point of view.
3) You get the ability to play through different scenarios and look at a situation from different angles.
And as she then added: “And on good days it allows you to be more open minded – you become less confrontational. You can more easily respect the other side and it becomes easier to change your initial plan or your strategy when you are wrong.”
The more I hear about bispective, the more I realise that it’s the opposite of an extremist. And it’s a very powerful tool. Having bispective makes you more curious, less judgmental, more open-minded and more empathetic.
After having been a professional speaker for 20 years I was tasked to organise a conference for professional speakers in 2018. Suddenly, I found myself on the other side of the “booking a speaker-table”. I thought I understood the process of booking a speaker – after all, I had been booked as a speaker more than 2000 times; but when I was the one actually booking the speakers I suddenly looked at the process in a totally new way. Getting frustrated with speakers for not sending in their slides on time made me appreciate the patience of meeting planners. Having speakers requesting a lot of changes to the schedule, length of speech etc, made me aware of the need for speakers to be more accommodating. Hearing speakers ignoring the brief I had been giving them, made me promise myself to always pay full attention to speaker briefs, and so on.
Organising a conference for speakers made me a better speaker to work with for conference organisers because now I had bispective on the speaker booking process.
Most people speak just one language, but, according to the Journal of Neurolinguistics, 43% of the world’s population is bilingual, as in “utilising two languages daily.”
A person who is bilingual not only knows how to speak two languages but being bilingual also increases creativity, flexibility and open-mindedness – and might very likely have a better cultural awareness.
Just as the world is getting aware of the advantage of speaking two languages, we also need to become more aware of the huge advantages of people having bispective on what they do.
How could you get a bispective on what you do?
28
Feb