Zoom In, Zoom Out Decision Making
Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has developed a smart analogy for thinking about decision making. It's the zoom lens on a camera. Zoom in, and you see a lot of detail in a small area. Zoom out to get a wide picture of the environment, but without much detail.
When you consider decisions, it's important to think about both the micro details and the broader trends. If you're lens get's stuck on zoom-in, you become former BP CEO Tony Heyward, who infamously told the press, "I'd like my life back," instead of properly acknowledging the turmoil around him in the Gulf of Mexico.
"Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar," Kanter writes in the March issue of Harvard Business Review. "Both perspectives -- worm's-eye and bird's-eye -- have virtues and pathologies. But they should be vantage points, not fixed positions. Leaders need multiple perspectives to get a complete picture. Effective leaders zoom in and zoom out."How do you know if you're too close in on your thinking? You probably disdain analysis, trusting, rather, to your own experience, contacts and intuition to make decisions. You like working the details, prefer one-on-one meetings and sniff at management theories. Strategy? Who needs it? This style can work, at least for awhile, for entrepreneurs who build their companies through the force of their own will and by leveraging personal contacts.
CEOs probably do better with zoom-out, wide-angle management. This is big picture decision making. Zoom-out leaders stay focused on principles and don't get dragged down in name calling. But strategic high-fliers might not see emerging threats that they would spot if closer to the ground. They don't see the promise of novel, or innovative, situations because those are outside the pattern.
So the best managers, says Kanter, are flexible thinkers who can deftly move from close-in to far-out. "Faced with a crisis, they can address the immediate situation while seeking structural solutions," she writes. "They can zoom in to see problems while zooming out to look for similar situations, root causes, and principles or policies that will help prevent the crisis from recurring."
Watch this video interview with Kanter, then come back here to tell us if you are a zoom-in or zoom-out manager.
Zooming: How Effective Leaders Adjust Their Focus
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