The Value of an Outside Perspective

One of the things I'm enjoying most about doing more board advisory work is seeing how often the same challenges appear in very different organisations.

The context changes, but questions around growth, income, audiences, positioning, partnerships and where to focus are surprisingly consistent.

I've spent my career moving between sectors. Agency and client side. Commercial businesses and charities. Large organisations and growing businesses. More recently, I've been working across consultancy, fractional leadership and board roles.

That variety is useful because you start to recognise patterns.

The way a commercial organisation thinks about customers might have something to teach a charity about supporters. A partnership model developed in the charity sector can open up a completely different conversation about growth in a business. Something learned from a scale-up can challenge the way a much larger organisation approaches pace or experimentation.

You also become less attached to the way things are usually done.

Every organisation develops its own language, habits and assumptions over time. Most exist for perfectly sensible reasons, but familiarity can make them difficult to see, let alone question.

An outside perspective creates some distance from that.

For me, the useful position is close enough to understand the organisation properly, but far enough away to ask questions, challenge assumptions and bring in thinking from elsewhere.

That doesn't mean arriving with an answer borrowed from another organisation. Context matters enormously, and what worked somewhere else may be entirely wrong for the organisation in front of you.

The value comes from having a wider frame of reference.

It means there are more places to look for ideas, more patterns to draw on and more ways of thinking about the decision in front of you.

I've always liked working this way. It probably goes back to starting my career in agencies, where the job required you to understand a business quickly, bring an external perspective and then turn that thinking into something useful.

Having subsequently spent years inside organisations and around the board table has added another layer to that. I know that a good idea only becomes valuable when it can work within the realities of the organisation expected to deliver it.

Perhaps that's why the space between inside and outside suits me.

You get enough distance to see things differently, while staying close enough to understand what it will take to make something happen.