Changing Your Perspective

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 8 space mission by NASA the first manned mission to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the Moon. The crew took one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th Century - showing the Earth rising above the horizon of the Moon - as they orbited far from home.

It's often been said that this picture of the Earth gave momentum and focus to the environmental movement, showing as it did our only home as a small, fragile, place floating in the vastness of space. A "grand oasis" as astronaut Jim Lovell put it at the time. The human race got a new perspective from the Apollo 8 mission, and one that perhaps had more impact than even the landing of man on the surface of the Moon in 1969.

As the folks at K2 know, I'm a bit of a space nut, and regularly see parallels between the events of 40 years ago for NASA and my work as a business leader at AXA now. The Apollo 8 story is no exception. Often at this time of the year we can find ourselves scrambling around seeking to get done all those tasks we said we would have finished by the "year end". We can get so bogged down in task completion at the coal face of business that we narrow our perspective too much. Oddly this happens just at the time when we are also seeking to define our purpose and aims for the coming year - which requires a wider focus.

This week my team and I had our last get together of 2008. Instead of choosing to spend all our time listing all the things we might not have done yet we lifted our collective view and stood back a way from our business to view it differently. This helped us tremendously in reestablishing the purpose of our team (Why we exist). The perspective we got from viewing our business as a whole entity - just as the Apollo 8 astronauts saw the whole Earth - also enabled us to make really great choices about What areas of performance it was best for us to focus on redefining & improving in 2009.

Instead of ending the year with a mindset beset by a list of things we didn't quite finish we've parted for the Christmas break with a really clear vision of what our ambition is for 2009, why we have those ambitions and how we need to perform, as a team and as individuals, in order to bring our ambition to life. Our changed perspective has given us a superb platform from which to deliver success in 2009 despite the chaos around us.

So, a thought from me as I remember Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders of Apollo 8, is to consider what perspective you are using in your work right now and to consider whether viewing things from a different angle or distance might help you make great choices for the year ahead.