#3 Future skills start with a shift in perspective

The third article in the series “Career Architecture in Practice”.

Each of the seven skills of the future I described in the first article rests on something we are rarely taught: the ability to look at a situation from somewhere other than where we happen to stand. Without it, strategic thinking gets stuck in a single scenario, cognitive empathy remains a good intention, and skill stacking never goes beyond what we already know. The ability can be developed on three levels: paying attention to what surrounds us, being willing to challenge our own beliefs, and having the nerve to connect fields that seem to have nothing in common.

In February 2015 the internet split over a dress. A photograph of a dress that the bride’s mother had bought for her daughter’s wedding went online with a simple question about its colour. Some viewers saw it as blue and black, others as white and gold, and both camps were certain. Within days the picture had been seen by tens of millions, the arguments had spilled into offices and homes, and perception scientists had taken up the question. The dress was blue and black. The more interesting question was why so many saw it differently. The photograph gives no clue about the light it was taken in, so the brain fills the gap on its own. Anyone who unconsciously assumes the dress is in shadow “subtracts” the bluish cast and sees white and gold.

In conversations at work and beyond it, we rarely get such clear proof that we are looking at the same thing and seeing something different. Nobody holds up a photograph, and nobody explains where the difference comes from. What remains is the certainty that our own interpretation is simply a description of what is there.

I call the ability to notice the assumption we are looking through a skill of the future, and since the phrase is used so loosely these days, it needs some justification. Artificial intelligence is making answers cheap and plentiful. What grows scarcer, and so more valuable, is what cannot be outsourced to a model: the ability to frame a problem from a different angle before anyone starts solving it. Someone who sees a situation from only one place will ask an AI one question and get one answer, however good.

A less obvious mechanism is at work too. Language models tend to agree with whoever is asking. If I build my own interpretation into the question, I get a polished version of it back, fluent and persuasive. AI can widen my view, but only if I deliberately ask it to: for the strongest argument against my position, say, or for a description of the situation through the eyes of the person most affected by the decision. Otherwise I get confirmation of what I already thought, only better phrased.

In the previous article in this series I wrote about creativity as a strategic skill, and about weaving experience from different fields into a coherent pattern. This time I turn to artists who have made shifting perspective their way of working.

It is easy to reduce creativity to what it produces. For me it is above all a way of looking at the world, and I learn it from artists, designers, musicians and technologists who push back the limits of what we take for granted. I do not go to them for ready-made answers. Questions have long been central to my life: I am drawn to philosophy, psychology and the foundations of our values, and as a certified mentor I work with them professionally too. These artists widen that inquiry, show me new vantage points and return familiar questions to me in unfamiliar settings.

In a world where it is ever easier to retreat into our own convictions, our greatest advantage may be a willingness truly to see another person. Shifting perspective does not mean giving up your own view. It takes the courage to stop treating it, for a moment, as the only possible one.

Whether we can stand in someone else’s shoes depends on goodwill, but also on cognitive functions that change over a lifetime and can be deliberately strengthened. I will come back to this at the end, because that is where the practice begins.

My relationship with art goes beyond looking at other artists’ work. I paint myself (if you are curious, have a look at my art profile), so the aesthetics and intimacy of the creative process are close to my heart. When I work on a canvas I keep changing my vantage point: I step back, return to a detail, abandon my first idea and check whether what is emerging really carries the emotions, meaning and values I want to share. Painting has taught me that a clear vision of the result does not require sticking to one route. Moving freely between viewpoints often gets you to the heart of the matter faster, on canvas and in any larger project.

Over time I realised that the minds behind the works draw me even more than the works themselves: how they see, the choices they make, their turning points, their stubbornness and sometimes their eccentricity. The deeper I go into these biographies, the clearer it becomes that remarkable work almost always has an equally remarkable, winding road behind it.

What I take from each of these stories, above all, is a way of thinking that can be carried into an entirely different life, including mine and, I hope, yours.

I have chosen four artists whose stories and ways of working I recommend as a starting point for your own search, and grouped them into three parts: noticing more, questioning the obvious and connecting distant worlds. One caveat before we begin. The word “perspective” covers three different things here: how we perceive, how we interpret, and how well we understand the way someone else sees a situation. Art is very good at training the first two. The third demands something more, and I return to it in the final part of the article.

In this article:

• Noticing more: Rick Rubin, Marina Abramović
• Questioning the obvious: Daan Roosegaarde
• Connecting distant worlds: Refik Anadol
• Before you see someone else’s point of view, notice your own: why it is so hard to stand in another person’s shoes, and how to practise

Before an idea appears, something far less spectacular has to happen: you have to notice something. A sound, a tension, a detail, a change in the light, or an awkward question that others walk straight past. Creative work therefore starts long before the desk, the studio or the blank canvas. It begins with how we are present in the world.

Rick Rubin. The silence in which the biggest hits are born

He was 20, living in a dormitory at NYU and unable to play an instrument, when he and Russell Simmons founded Def Jam Recordings, the label that changed the face of popular music. He has since produced Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Adele, Metallica, Jay-Z and Kanye West without ever working the mixing desk or learning to read music. His job has always been to listen, more closely than anyone else in the room.

If I had to name the one person among these four who has done most to make me see differently, it would be him. He changed not only how I think about creativity, but also how I make decisions.

My encounter with Rick Rubin began with his book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”. I came across a book about attention, about being ready for an idea when it arrives, and about the inner state that creative work grows out of. You may know it: a pale grey cover with a distinctive black circle and a dot in the middle. If you have not read it, I warmly recommend it, with one caveat. It asks for your full presence and attention. Read on the run, it gives little back.

I read it slowly, sometimes returning to a single chapter several times, because its deceptively simple sentences revealed something new at every reading. What read like a thought about art the first time had become, by the third, a thought about leadership, about decisions I was facing at the time, and sometimes simply about life.

What moved me most was his view of the artist’s role. The artist need not strain to invent something that has never existed. The task is rather to become sensitive to what is already trying to emerge. That idea shifted something in how I understand creativity: instead of asking only what I can create, I began to ask more often what I am still failing to notice.

The book also made me curious about the man himself. I started watching interviews with him, listening to how he speaks, to his pauses and to the way he builds a thought. I was struck that someone who has worked with the biggest names in music gives so much room to silence, intuition and the quality of attention. The language in which an artist describes the world can teach you more than any ready-made set of rules, so I have added below the conversations that held me longest. Sometimes a single sentence in an interview opens a new line of thought and stays with me for a long time.

There is one idea of his I keep coming back to: be wary of assuming that the way you work is the best way simply because it is how you have always worked. Rubin is talking about working methods, but the same applies to how we think about others. We assume we know what the other side needs, because that is how it has always been, and we rarely check.

What to do with this: test how well you really know how others see things

Pick a project, decision or problem you are working on now. Think of two stakeholders who see it from a different side, for instance the person you are building a solution for and someone who will have to put it into practice.

Step 1. Write down how you imagine they see it

First, write down what you think the problem is. Then describe how each of them sees it. What do you think matters most to them? What might stand in the way of their goal? What facts might the other side be missing? At this stage, rely only on your own assumptions.

Step 2. Talk to them and check

Talk to both of them. Do not lead with your idea or your notes. Ask each of them to describe the situation in their own words. Ask what they consider most important, what really gets in the way, and what others might be missing.

After the conversations, compare their answers with your notes from step 1. Mark where they match and where your picture differed from theirs. Check whether you would still define the problem the same way. The exercise shows that the view we attribute to someone is often not the view they actually hold. Only a conversation reveals the gap, before you start working on a solution.

You may be thinking: “I don’t have time for this.” But how much time do you spend later clearing up misunderstandings, fixing solutions that missed the mark, or reopening a conversation that each side left with a different understanding? What is at stake is your time, your energy and the quality of your relationships, at work and outside it. One question asked instead of an assumption can end a recurring argument, reveal what the other person really needs, or save you from solving the wrong problem. Try it on one matter that is on your mind now. See what changes when, instead of assuming, you simply ask.

Worth starting with:

• Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” (2023), the book where it all began for me.
• ▶ Rick Rubin: Legendary Music Producer | Lex Fridman Podcast #275 Two hours on art, attention and working with artists. The episode that held me longest.
• ▶ How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin, Huberman Lab The most practical conversation about how to hear an idea before it exists.

Marina Abramović. The art of being present

In 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Marina Abramović staged the performance “The Artist Is Present”. For nearly three months, more than 700 hours in all, she sat in silence in the museum’s atrium. Opposite her stood a single empty chair. Any visitor could sit in it and meet her gaze without a word, and the queues stretched through the museum. She reduced art to its simplest gesture: being fully present to another person. Our days are filled with stimuli, commentary and movement, and Abramović stripped away everything one might hide behind. There was no decoration, no story, no explanation. What remained was one person facing another, and time that could not be hurried. Stripped back like this, attention stops being merely the condition for an encounter and becomes an experience in its own right, one that can move you deeply.

During the performance her former partner, Ulay, also sat down opposite her. More than 20 years earlier the two had ended their life together with a walk along the Great Wall of China. They set off from opposite ends, walked for three months to meet in the middle, and said goodbye.

I only came to know her art properly in 2025, in Vienna. It enchanted and baffled me in equal measure, and left me uneasy, wondering why such seemingly simple acts provoke so strong a reaction. I came away wanting to understand a woman who could turn her own body, the limits of endurance, silence, relationships and time into artistic material. So I began to read about her life.

Her biography showed me how much it matters to know an artist’s path, not just the outcome of their work. A fragment seen in a gallery can intrigue, but only the successive decisions and turns in an artist’s life reveal the larger pattern. A work never comes out of nowhere; it is part of someone’s transformation. Abramović pushes the boundaries of art and, at the same time, changes how we think about relationships, attention and the courage to be truly present.

In everyday working life, the closest thing to the MoMA experience is a one-to-one conversation. Many such conversations take place with a laptop open on the next task and half a mind on the next meeting. The other person usually senses it and says less, more cautiously, closer to what they think is expected. Abramović shows an extreme version of something available every day in a small dose: a quarter of an hour of attention, without interrupting and without composing a reply in your head. Often only then can you hear what someone really came to say.

If Marina has caught your interest, it is worth exploring:

• “The Artist Is Present” (2012, directed by Matthew Akers), a documentary about the MoMA retrospective, available on HBO Max among others. Clips and the trailer are on YouTube under the same title.
• Conversations with Marina Abramović on the Louisiana Channel (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) on YouTube: short, intimate interviews, including “How to Drink a Glass of Water” and a 2017 conversation about her 50 years of work.
• The story of “The Great Wall Walk” (1988) with Ulay, told in her book “Walk Through Walls: A Memoir” (2016) and in the documentary above.

We look at the world through filters built from experience, beliefs and habits that we rarely notice, which is why we feel we see it as it is. The dress of 2015 demonstrated this on millions of viewers. Daan Roosegaarde does something similar with the spaces we live in every day: he challenges an assumption that hardly anyone questions, and shows what becomes visible once we give something up.

Daan Roosegaarde. Beauty that takes responsibility

Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch artist who brings together design, technology and environmental thinking, and his projects aim for more than an aesthetic effect. They tackle real problems of space, air, energy and quality of life. One of his most interesting projects is “Seeing Stars”, which treats the night sky as part of humanity’s shared heritage. Selected towns switched off unnecessary street lights, advertising billboards and household lighting to draw attention to light pollution. The project also set out to help residents reconnect with nature and bring local communities together, giving them a rare chance to gaze at a clear night sky from their own streets.

He has talked about his work not only on the TED stage but also at the Love Tomorrow Summit 2026 (recording here). For the curious: it is a one-day innovation festival run by the organisers of Tomorrowland on the music festival’s grounds in Boom, Belgium. Instead of concerts there are conversations about sustainability, technology and the future, in the same spectacular setting where several hundred thousand festival-goers dance every summer.

“Seeing Stars” reminds me that seeing differently does not always mean adding something new. Sometimes you have to remove whatever blocks the view to see again what was there all along. In organisations, the equivalent of switching off the lights is often a review of recurring meetings and reports. Some of them were set up long ago to solve a problem that no longer exists, and they have been taking up time ever since, time in which something more important might have come into view.

The first way of seeing differently is noticing; the second is questioning our own interpretations. The third begins when we stop policing the borders between fields and art meets data, technology meets imagination, and the algorithm meets the artist’s sensibility. It is at these intersections that I find the most interesting creative work today.

Refik Anadol. What does a machine see when it dreams?

In May 2022, and again in 2023, Refik Anadol covered the entire façade of Casa Batlló in Barcelona, Gaudí’s UNESCO-listed house, with an animation that artificial intelligence had generated from a billion images of the building and the city. More than 125,000 viewers watched the projection live, and recordings of it spread across social media worldwide. The work, a digital piece that changes in real time, sold at Christie’s as an NFT for $1.3m.

Anadol treats data as an artistic medium and algorithms as a new instrument of the imagination. His work fascinates me because it lifts data out of spreadsheets, servers and abstract systems and gives it movement, light, scale and feeling. Information becomes experience.

Last year I saw a similar spectacle at Vienna’s Museum of Change (MOC), an open-air museum of AI art. On the walls of a historic courtyard, artificial intelligence generated ever-changing visuals and music live. If you find yourself in Vienna, it is worth seeing.

Debates about artificial intelligence often turn on whether technology will replace the artist. Refik Anadol asks a different question: what might we see once humans and technology begin to extend each other’s reach?

That shift in the question matters to anyone introducing AI. Anadol does not ask a model for a finished picture. He decides what data the model learns from, which outputs stay and which are discarded, and in what space the result is shown. The value of his work lies precisely in those choices. Many organisations show the opposite reflex: an expectation that the tool will decide on its own what matters. The result is often plenty of content and few decisions.

Let us go back for a moment to the dress of 2015. Those who saw white and gold were not being careless. They simply did not know that their brain had decided, on its own, what light the dress was standing in. The stories of the artists in this article rest on a similar observation that is easy to miss: to change your perspective, you first have to notice that you have one. It sounds obvious, but in practice it is often the hardest step. Many of us do not reject other points of view. We simply do not see them, because our own interpretation seems the only possible account of the situation. You can see this in teams, in families and in public debate. Everyone talks, argues and tries to persuade, yet the conversation goes nowhere, because each side is describing a different problem while convinced it is the same one.

This is especially true of those with deeply entrenched beliefs, whatever the subject: management, raising children, technology or politics. The stronger the conviction, the more it feels like reality and the easier it is to forget that it is only one possible account of it. That is why even those who feel they have no need to understand other points of view need to work at it, and the work is usually uncomfortable. The discomfort does not mean you are doing something wrong. It is often the first sign that you have touched something that until now lay outside your field of vision.

Why the mind so readily mistakes thoughts for reality

Cognitive-behavioural psychology, and in particular acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), developed by Steven C. Hayes, has a name for this: cognitive fusion. It describes a state in which a thought stops being a thought and starts being treated as a fact. “This project will fail.” “He’s always late.” “Young people don’t want to work.” “Older people don’t get technology.” When we are fused with a thought like this, we do not test it; we act as if it were true. And if it is true, anyone who sees things differently must simply be wrong.

The antidote is defusion: putting some distance between ourselves and our thoughts. The simplest technique is to preface a thought with a short phrase: “I’m having the thought that…” Instead of “this project will fail”, you tell yourself “I’m having the thought that this project will fail”. The content stays the same, but your relationship to it changes. That opens up room to ask where the thought came from and what else might be true.

The cognitive functions that make it possible to see differently

We often treat the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes as a character trait: you are either empathetic or you are not. Neuropsychology offers something more specific, and more hopeful. Taking another person’s perspective relies on what are known as executive functions, the part of our cognition that lets us direct attention and behaviour deliberately. Adele Diamond, one of the most widely cited researchers in the field, identifies three core ones:

• Inhibition (inhibitory control): the ability to hold back an automatic reaction. Without it, our first interpretation immediately becomes our answer.
• Working memory: the ability to hold several pieces of information in mind at once, and so keep our own view alongside someone else’s instead of instantly replacing one with the other.
• Cognitive flexibility: the ability to switch between viewpoints and adjust how we think when circumstances change.

These functions work like infrastructure. They weaken under stress, fatigue, lack of sleep and time pressure, which is precisely when we most need to understand the other side: in a conflict, a difficult conversation or an important decision. They are also what allows us to understand our own vantage point. It is hard to see where I am standing if I cannot step away from it for a moment.

What gets in the way

We all now live in an environment that is excellent at training rapid shifts of attention but rarely asks us to hold two conflicting positions in mind for long. Algorithms serve up content that matches what we already like and believe, so we can go a long time without meeting a genuinely different point of view. Younger generations have known no other environment, and they bring their own strengths to it. I see in those younger than me a far greater openness to different lifestyles and identities than in my own generation. Accepting diversity, however, is not the same skill as understanding someone who thinks quite differently about something that matters to us. That second skill has to be trained deliberately, whatever our age: by talking to those outside our own bubble, by reading longer texts, by asking questions before passing judgement.

In our working lives we draw on both our cognitive functions and our growing experience. Yet that very experience can hold us back. The better we know our field, the easier it is to treat the tried-and-tested way of doing things as the only sensible one, and the harder it becomes to see possibilities beyond familiar patterns. Erik Dane, a professor of organisational behaviour at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis, called this trap cognitive entrenchment in a 2010 article, “Reconsidering the Trade-off Between Expertise and Flexibility: A Cognitive Entrenchment Perspective”. Knowledge gives us an edge, but clinging to what we already know and can do may stop us noticing other possibilities.

How to practise seeing differently every day

I suggest three methods, one for each of the levels I began with. Choose the one that intrigues you most and try it at the next opportunity.

• Noticing more: learn something new and demanding. You watch a tutorial and everything looks easy. Only when you try to edit a film yourself, play a few chords or write your first program do you discover what you cannot yet do. That is the kind of attempt I encourage: choose something that interests you but that you have not yet mastered. You need not be good at it straight away, nor turn it into another project to show the world. Give yourself time for mistakes, for trying other approaches and for gradual progress. Choose something you genuinely want to learn, and allow yourself, for a while, not to know how. When you cannot do something, you start to notice details that used to escape you.
• Questioning the obvious: step back and look for what contradicts you. When you are struggling to decide what to do, imagine that someone close to you has come to you with a similar problem. What would you ask them first? What would you advise them to check before deciding? Write down your answer, then return to your own situation and see whether anything has surfaced that you had overlooked. The exercise has solid grounding in research. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross described what they called Solomon’s paradox: we reason more wisely about others’ problems than about our own, and looking at our own situation from a distance narrows the gap. Once you have formed a view, stop and ask yourself: “What could prove me wrong?” Look for information that does not fit your assessment, or ask someone who sees the matter differently what their position rests on. The point is not to force yourself to change your mind, nor to treat all opinions as equally valid. Simply check whether your assessment takes account of what contradicts it, not only of what confirms it.
• Connecting distant worlds: borrow a lens from another field. Take a problem you are working on and consider how someone from an entirely different world would approach it: an architect, a gardener, a musician, a doctor or a nursery-school teacher. Daan Roosegaarde would ask what needs to be removed in order to see more. Refik Anadol would ask what data your picture of the situation is built on, and what has been left out. Write down three such views, even if at first glance they seem odd. Usually at least one of them exposes an assumption you had not noticed. Bear in mind, though, that this exercise broadens your own thinking about the problem but tells you nothing about how it looks to those it affects. That you can only find out in conversation.

When I look at these artists, what fascinates me is the moment when each of them stopped trusting the way they used to think: an encounter, a loss, a decision after which there was no going back to an earlier version of themselves.

I pay ever closer attention to such moments, in my own story and in the stories of those I mentor. The breakthrough itself interests me less than what allows us to see our own situation in a new light. Sometimes it is a conversation that stays with us for a long time. Sometimes it is a question, a resistance to the direction we have been taking, or the sudden realisation that the answer we were looking for depends on where we are looking from. That is when perspective stops being an abstract notion and begins to shape our choices.

That is why in my book, “Me + My Manager: A Modern Language of Leadership in the Age of AI”, I will explore this mechanism in far more depth, alongside my own story of transformation, which, like every real one, did not run in a straight line. To learn more about the book, click here.

A practical module on applying a shift in perspective to everyday project work will be part of my digital course, launching soon 😊 (follow me on Instagram for updates)

Start with one new way of seeing

There is no need to get to know all four stories at once. It is enough to choose one artist, read a book, watch a conversation or stand in front of a work of art without hurrying, and see what happens.

And if you find that other points of view do not come easily, start with the exercise in the Rick Rubin section: a conversation with one person who thinks differently from you, with one aim, to genuinely understand them.

At the start I wrote that a shift in perspective is a precondition for the other skills of the future. It shows most clearly in strategic thinking: a plan built from a single vantage point has a single scenario, however complete it looks. The same goes for working with AI, which will give back as many perspectives as you managed to fit into the question.

Perhaps nothing will change straight away, but one thought will stay with you, start to work, and come back to you during a conversation, a decision or the planning of your next change.

If, after reading this, someone on your team asks why you have suddenly started asking more questions, you know where to send them 😉

Happy looking!