How many senses do you have? Most of us will say five: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Some will talk about a sixth sense—intuition. In a conversation about his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Kenneth Robinson told Susan Bratton of DishyMix that we have several other senses, like a sense of balance and a sense of temperature. He explains,
“Well my point is that, that if we underestimate something as basic as the sense that we have, you know, if we’ve grown up thinking there were five and there are at least nine, well what else are we taking for granted that might be wrong..”
What are you taking for granted as a CEO? What are your blind spots? How do you discover them?
In the book, The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, the First Law of Performance is:
“How people perform correlates to the way the world occurs to them.”
In other words, how you as a CEO perceive the world, determines how you perform in the world. What happens if you are not seeing something?
What is the answer?
Be open.
Be curious about other perspectives.
Find a group of peers with no agenda that can provide you with their perspective; listen to what they have to say, and then reflect on it.
