Our point of view affects what we see. An extreme example is that we can’t see what's in the backyard by looking out a front window. Another example is one where we misassign causes. If we see a cat walk by through a knothole in a fence, and the knothole is the right height, we will see the head and the tail of the cat, but not the body as it walks by the knothole. As the cat walks back and forth, we will see its head and then it's tail over and over. We can then logically conclude that heads cause tails, because we never see that they are connected by a body.
It's also commonplace to ignore that causes have causes. When we analyze what caused a flat tire, and we find a nail in the tire, we say the nail caused the flat. We don't say the cause is careless dropping of a nail where we could run over it, we don’t say that someone taking a turn too fast caused a keg of nails to tip over and leave one where we could run over it and we also don’t say there are other possible causes. The point is that there is no “the cause”, there are instead a series of events and we pick one because it's useful for our purposes. There is a nail in the tire is enough when all we want is the flat fixed. It may not be enough if what we want to do is prevent flats in the future.
It's easy to see that increasing our field of view reveals options that a limited cause/effect perspective conceals. As our example shows, the flat can be caused by the nail or by actions that resulted in the nail being in a place where it could be run over and puncture a tire. Metaphorically, the window we look out of determines what we see.
Different people with different backgrounds see different things. They have different fields of view. Focus groups are used to learn what customers see from their point of view that business people don't see. In a series of focus group meetings, recurring themes and opinions are instructive in guiding business decisions and actions. Because five people can look at the same thing and see something different, cross functional teams are often used by business. Business managers know that engineers, accountants, salesmen, procurement people and manufacturing people, all look from a different perspective and getting the whole story can depend on considering each independent interpretation of the situation. The same can be said for researchers looking for answers to tough questions. Names of research teams vary, but they are all some form of multi-discipline or cross discipline team made up of physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians or others in a position to contribute ideas. Seemingly unrelated disciplines with different fields of view are many times the most valuable in revealing what's missing.
