How to See More

Insight

Even the best leaders can overestimate how fully they understand a problem.

Ironically, this is a result of their experience. Familiar patterns, deep expertise and past projects create a sense of clarity. Yet, the more complex the challenge, the more it resists single-lens solutions.

Triangulating multiple perspectives of a problem helps.

Triangulation is a methodological approach used in research, analysis, and problem-solving where multiple sources and perspectives are used to examine a single issue.

When you use this approach, you’re not just solving today’s challenge, you’re preventing tomorrow’s.

Insight in Practice

Here are four elements of the process of triangulation you can use to gain a deeper understanding of a problem.

• Understand structural drivers.
  Complex challenges look different depending on where you stand. Consider perspectives across the ecosystem: policymakers, funders, service providers.

• Engage the people closest to the problem (early).
  No report can replace insights from those directly affected and frontline staff. The sooner you involve them in the process, the better: they know what works and what gets stuck.

• Seek cross-sectoral views.
  Social issues rarely sit neatly within one domain. Problems are influenced by interconnected systems:health, education, economics, environment, and more. Explore how different sectors intersect. You can read examples of this in the recent WE Forum report on collective social innovation.

• Honor cultural contexts.
  The way problems are experienced and addressed is shaped by values, norms, and identities. Solutions must resonate within these lived realities.

When you take time to gather and respect these perspectives, patterns emerge:

• Power imbalances, like who gets to make decisions and who gets left out.
• Incentives, like what motivates different actors to act or resist.
• System boundaries where one group’s responsibility "ends.”

Most importantly, you stop designing in the dark.

Case Study

When a Finnish specialist hospital set out to introduce the Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) role, they knew the complexity of the work demanded clear understanding of the problems the role would solve.

The CNS role—an advanced practice nurse focused on improving patient care—needed to be carefully integrated into an existing system.

To do this, leaders turned to participatory action research, using triangulation to capture the full picture.

• Focus groups gathered real-time insights from staff about challenges and needs.
• Action-learning groups created space for reflection and planning.
• Field journals allowed researchers to track observations and subtle dynamics over time.
• Staff members from different departments were involved as co-researchers.

Using multiple perspectives and data sources helped the research team and hospital staff gain a fuller, more actionable understanding of the CNS role.

“Outcomes of successful implementation led to increased visibility of nursing expertise, development, integration and quality assurance of nursing processes and practice.” - The CNS Role Implementation Research Report.

You can read the full report here.

Question to Consider

Where are you still relying on a single lens and what new perspective could shift your understanding?

Quote of The Week

"When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change."

—Max Planck