Trish's Blog

BigVu broke. This isn’t a slam on them, and it’s definitely not a sideways dig. This post isn’t really about the app at all. It’s about me, or more accurately, my response to it. And I’ll be upfront. It wasn’t pretty.

When the issue first popped up on Friday, I did what I usually do. I persevered. I pushed on. I muttered a few choice words. Eventually, I waved the white flag and gave myself an early mark, promising myself I’d regroup with a fresh head on Saturday morning.

Saturday came and the app still wasn’t working.

I jumped into a support conversation. Support did exactly what support is meant to do. Diagnostics, checks, troubleshooting. I sent screenshots and confirmed repeatedly that it still wasn’t working. The messages started repeating. Every time I responded, the same instructions came back. From where I was sitting, nothing was moving. I started typing in capital letters. Impatient. Frustrated. Convinced I was not being heard.

I could say in my defence that I was uncaffeinated. But there is no excuse for “yelling” at someone who is trying to do their job.

Then the support person apologised for the duplicate messages and explained that they were juggling hundreds of conversations about the exact same issue.

Ping! Suddenly I could see it from his perspective. The same messages I had taken as indifference were actually volume. The repetition I had read as not listening was process under pressure. Nothing about his intent had changed. Only my understanding of it had.

And that insight came late.

This is where I fall on my sword. I teach this. I work with leaders and teams on perspective-taking, on curiosity, and on stepping out of position and into understanding. And there I was, completely up to my armpits in position, reacting instead of noticing.

It is one thing to talk about perspective when you are calm, considered, and sitting in a workshop. It is another thing entirely when you are in the middle of something that is not going your way. When your time feels squeezed. When your expectations are not being met. When you feel stuck.

That is the test.

Diversity of Thought sounds great when we talk about it. It is often framed as a strength, a driver of better decisions, a pathway to innovation. All true. But we rarely talk about the friction that comes with it. The discomfort. The moments where your version of events feels so right, so obvious, that anything else feels like resistance.

In those moments, we default to position. Position is tidy. It is certain. It keeps us anchored in our own experience. It also narrows everything. It filters what we hear. It shapes what we notice. It decides, often very quickly, who is right and who is wrong.

And once we are in it, it is hard to move. That is what happened here. I was not curious. I was not open. I was not exploring alternative explanations. I had decided what was happening, and I was responding to that version of reality.

It took one sentence from someone else to disrupt it. Not a long explanation. Not a perfectly crafted response. Just a simple piece of context that I had not considered. Hundreds of conversations. Same issue. High volume. Limited capacity.

It did not change the problem. The app was still not working. It changed how I saw the person on the other end. And that changed how I showed up.

This is the part that often gets missed. Perspective taking is not about agreeing. It is not about excusing poor experiences or pretending frustration does not exist. It is about widening the frame enough to see more than one version of what might be going on.

It gives you options. Without it, your response is almost automatic. With it, there is at least a moment of choice. I did not take that moment early enough. That is on me.

We are human. We react. We get frustrated. We narrow our view. Especially under pressure, especially when things are not working, especially when we feel like we are not being heard.

That is not a reason to disengage from Diversity of Thought. It is the very reason we need it.

Because those are the moments that shape relationships. Those are the moments that influence outcomes. Those are the moments where a small shift in perspective can change the tone of an entire interaction.

Not perfectly. Not every time. But often enough to matter.

So the question I am left with is a simple one.

When you feel yourself getting pulled into position, how quickly can you catch it?