The Power of Outside Perspective

You’ve pondered a dilemma for days, unsure of the solution.  Then you explain your problem to a friend hoping for ideas (or perhaps just sympathy) and they surprise you by providing a solution you never even considered in the blink of an eye. This is the power of outside perspective.

Outside perspective can come from the marketing company you hire to help give you greater insight into your customers, the therapist you hire to help you improve your relationships, or the coach you hire to help you with your golf swing. When you enlist an outside perspective, you often set yourself up to make progress faster than you would on your own.

This comes into play in my work as a Writer/Producer quite often. A client of mine struggled for weeks to create a script for an animated project. The video needed to be succinct and impactful while covering a few important points for their core audience, but the initial draft script had been written by people extremely close to the topic and the editing team was extremely close to it as well. Additionally, they hadn’t scripted many animated pieces, so trying to turn what they wanted to say into visual ideas had become a road block. With my outside perspective, I was able to quickly identify the information that the audience would care about the most and develop ways to illustrate that messaging with animation. For me, it was a fun script punch-up. For my client, it was a massive time-saver.

If you’re part of an internal communications or marketing team, you get used to talking to the same audience about the same issues. An outside perspective can spur a big breakthrough, uncovering insights you may never have arrived at on your own.

You may have produced a number of videos for your organization and your core audience, but an outside producer will have created videos for dozens of clients with dozens of different goals and audiences. They may be able to bring a previous experience to bear on a project in a way that your internal team simply couldn’t. Similarly, an outside marketing firm will have a wider breadth of experience and a larger toolset at their disposal than the average internal team will, particularly if that organization is small.

I find that it’s never as easy to write about myself as it is to write about someone or something else. You are an expert in your audience and your subject matter, but sometimes collaborating with a party that has fresh eyes can provide valuable insights. As a communicator, your goal is to find the most effective message for a specific audience and a specific purpose. An outside perspective can help you hone that message and find creative, impactful ways to deliver it.