Why Every Entrepreneur Needs an Outside Perspective

Research & Sources / Mentorship & Sounding Boards

Imagine you are sitting inside a big glass jar. You can see out, a little blurred, but you cannot read the label printed on the outside. Everyone walking past can read it easily. Only you can’t. That is what running your own business feels like. You are inside it every day. The label is obvious to everyone except you.

Too close to see

Entrepreneurs know their business better than anyone: every client, every number, every story. And that is exactly the problem. When you know every detail, it becomes hard to see the shape of the whole. Patterns that an outsider would notice in ten minutes stay invisible for years.

The price that has always been too low. The client who takes far more time than they are worth. The team member everyone works around. The product that should have been stopped long ago. From inside the jar, these look normal.

Everyone has blind spots

Emily Pronin and colleagues at Stanford showed that people readily see biases in others but believe they are much less affected themselves, and keep believing it even after the bias is explained to them.¹ This is not a character flaw. It is how every human mind works.

So the solution is not to try harder to be objective. It is to bring in someone who stands outside the jar.

Outside views improve judgement

Ilan Yaniv studied how people use advice. He found that people tend to give too little weight to other people’s views, yet when they do use advice, their judgements become more accurate.² We trust our own view a bit too much, and an outside view corrects for that.

Researchers Bahador Bahrami and colleagues showed that two people who openly share how confident they are can reach better joint decisions than the better of the two alone.³ Two pairs of eyes, honestly compared, see more than one.

Where to find an outside perspective

• A mentor who has built a similar business.
• A peer group of entrepreneurs at a similar stage.
• An advisory board, even an informal one.
• A thinking partner who asks the questions nobody inside asks.
• Customers, who see you from outside every day.

What matters is that the person has no interest in keeping things as they are, and is willing to tell you what they see.

Making the most of it

Ask for the uncomfortable view. “What would you change first if this were your business?”

Don’t defend immediately. Write it down. Think about it for a day.

Make it regular. An outside view once in a crisis helps a little. An outside view every month changes how you run the business.

What this means for you this week

• Name two people outside your business whose judgement you respect.
• Ask one of them to look at one problem with fresh eyes.
• Ask three customers what they would change about working with you.
• Write down one thing you learned that you did not see before.

You live inside the jar. Find someone who can read the label.

Sources

1. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y. & Ross, L. (2002). The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381. doi.orgPeople see biases in others far more easily than in themselves.
2. Yaniv, I. (2004). Receiving other people’s advice: Influence and benefit. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 93(1), 1-13. doi.orgPeople give too little weight to advice, yet using advice improves the accuracy of their judgements.
3. Bahrami, B. et al. (2010). Optimally Interacting Minds. Science, 329(5995), 1081-1085. doi.orgTwo people who talk openly about their confidence can make better joint judgements than the better of the two alone.