The Organizational Kaleidoscope: Are We Seeing the Same Situation?

There is something fascinating about a kaleidoscope. The pieces inside it never really change. Turn the tube slightly, though, and those same pieces fall into a new relationship with one another. A pattern that seemed perfectly clear disappears and another takes its place.

Organizations can be surprisingly similar.

A group of capable people can look at the same information, serve the same customers or constituents, work toward the same goals and still see very different versions of what is happening around them. It is tempting to assume that one of them must be missing something. Often, however, each person is seeing something the others cannot.

The person focused on growth may recognize an opportunity and believe the organization needs to move before the window closes. Someone responsible for operations may immediately see the strain that opportunity would put on people and systems. Finance may notice a risk that neither has considered. Someone working directly with customers may have picked up on a shift that has not yet made its way into the data. Even time changes the view. A leader thinking about where the organization needs to be three years from now is occupying a different position from the person dealing with something that changed yesterday.

None of these perspectives is necessarily wrong. They are simply views through different parts of the organizational kaleidoscope.

Before We Try to Get Everyone Aligned

Organizations spend a great deal of time trying to create alignment. We plan, communicate, clarify responsibilities, hold meetings and work on collaboration. All of those things matter, but there may be something that needs to happen before any of them can work particularly well: we need to understand what people are actually seeing.

Different positions naturally produce different questions. The person who sees opportunity asks how quickly the organization can move. The person who sees risk wonders what happens if the assumptions are wrong. Someone close to the work wants to know whether the plan accounts for what is changing on the ground. The person responsible for resources wonders whether it can be sustained.

Those questions can sound like resistance to one another when they may actually be pieces of a more complete picture. The difficulty is that organizations tend to move fairly quickly from presenting information to discussing what should be done about it. If everyone has seen the presentation, reviewed the numbers and participated in the conversation, it feels reasonable to assume that everyone is starting from the same place.

But that assumption deserves more attention. Experience comes into the room with us. So do responsibilities, priorities, pressures, assumptions and information that other people may not have. Two people can hear exactly the same words and give them very different weight because of everything else they know.

What If Different Perspectives Are Useful?

Different perspectives are often treated as something a team needs to reconcile. Yet the differences themselves may contain useful information.

A diamond cutter understands this intuitively. A stone is not examined from one angle with the expectation that a single view will reveal everything worth knowing. It is turned and studied because different angles reveal different things. Something invisible from one position may become obvious from another. The quality of the eventual decision depends, in part, on having seen enough of the stone before making the cut.

There is a useful organizational lesson in that. The objective does not have to be getting everyone to see things identically. In fact, trying too quickly to create a single view can cause us to lose some of the very information that would help us make a better decision.

A better starting point may be curiosity about position. What is someone seeing from where they sit? What do they know that others may not know? What are they paying attention to that someone in another role has discounted? How does the situation look when viewed through their responsibilities, experience and proximity to the work?

This does not mean every perspective is equally accurate, nor does it mean a team should remain indefinitely in exploration. Decisions still have to be made and leaders still have to lead. But there is a meaningful difference between reaching a decision after the different views have been understood and reaching one because those differences were hurried out of the conversation.

Orientation May Come Before Alignment

This may help explain why alignment can sometimes be so elusive. We often try to align around an answer before we have oriented around the situation.

Orientation asks us to spend a little more time understanding where we actually are before deciding where we should go. In an organization, that also means recognizing that “where we are” may look different depending on where someone is standing.

The goal is not necessarily to eliminate those differences. It is to make them visible enough that the team can understand what they reveal when considered together. Only then can a shared position begin to emerge without requiring people to discard what they uniquely see.

This distinction matters because participation is not the same as alignment, and agreement is not always evidence of shared understanding. A room full of people can agree to a decision while holding very different assumptions about what was decided, why it matters and what should happen next.

The Picture Never Stays Still

Even when a team does develop a clear shared picture, there is another complication: the kaleidoscope turns again.

Markets move. Technology changes. A key employee leaves and someone new arrives. Customer needs shift. Resources tighten or expand. New information becomes available. Something that once looked like a constraint becomes possible, while something everyone assumed was stable suddenly is not.

A strategy can have been exactly right when it was created and still become wrong for the position an organization occupies today. The fact that everyone agreed on it six months ago does not make the world responsible for staying the same.

That is why we have become increasingly interested in orientation as an ongoing organizational practice rather than something that happens once before planning. We observe what is happening, understand where we are in relation to it and act with intention. Then we continue paying attention, because both our position and the environment around us will change.

When we are working with other people, there is another dimension to that practice. We also need to understand where they are standing and what becomes visible from there.

Seeing More Before Deciding What Comes Next

This thinking is part of what led us to CoreSelf Mapping and CoreSelf Positioning. We have been exploring what changes when people have a clearer understanding of their own position before they try to orient with others, and what becomes possible when a group can bring those different perspectives together without immediately debating, defending or compressing them into agreement.

The kaleidoscope offers a useful way to think about that challenge. The goal is not to get everyone looking through it and seeing exactly the same picture. It may be to turn it together slowly enough to understand what each new angle reveals, how those views relate to one another and what they tell us about the situation we actually occupy.

From there, a team can decide what comes next with a fuller view of what is really in front of them. 

Curious What This Looks Like in Practice?

See how one team used CoreSelf Positioning to examine a shared situation from several positions before deciding what should happen next.

Read the Team Impact Brief →

When people observe where they are individually, they have a better foundation for orienting together. A CoreSelf Positioning workshop creates the conditions for orientation, so that your teams can move forward with clarity, agency, and integrity, even in uncertainty.

Teach Your Teams to Orient before they Optimize →

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