Perspective Is a Strategic Discipline
Updated: Sep 6
Understanding Before Persuasion
Advocacy often begins with a reasonable question: How do we get other people to understand what we see?
We gather evidence, sharpen our arguments, tell stories, identify harms, and try to explain why an issue deserves attention. When people remain unconvinced, the instinct is often to explain it again, perhaps with better evidence, stronger language, or greater urgency. If they could just see what we see, we think, they would understand why this matters.
There is another question that deserves just as much attention: What does the world look like from where they are standing?
That question can feel uncomfortable in advocacy because we tend to associate perspective with empathy, compromise, or finding common ground. Those things can matter, but perspective has another function that is much more practical. It gives us information. If we are trying to influence a decision maker, expand a coalition, change public opinion, or move someone who is uncertain, understanding how that person sees the issue is part of understanding the environment in which change has to happen.
We all advocate from inside our own perception. We know the history we know, see the harms we have learned to recognize, use language that makes sense within our communities, and organize information according to values that feel important to us. Over time, that framework can become so familiar that we forget it is a framework at all.
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin
Effective advocacy requires the ability to step outside it.
The View From Inside the Cause
One of the challenges of becoming deeply involved in an issue is that our own reasoning begins to feel increasingly obvious. We have spent months or years reading, listening, talking, and thinking about something that another person may have considered only occasionally. We know the vocabulary. We understand the history. We know which arguments have already been debated and which conclusions people in our circles consider settled.
Then we encounter someone who does not share that understanding.
It is tempting to interpret the gap as ignorance, indifference, selfishness, prejudice, or bad faith. Sometimes one of those explanations may be accurate, but deciding too quickly creates a strategic problem. Once we believe we know why someone disagrees with us, we stop investigating. We begin responding to the person we have constructed in our minds rather than the person who is actually in front of us.
That matters because people can arrive at the same position for very different reasons. Someone may resist a policy because of cost, distrust of government, fear of unintended consequences, loyalty to a community, concern about fairness, previous experience with a similar program, or simply because they do not understand what is being proposed. Treating all resistance as if it comes from the same place guarantees that much of our communication will miss its mark.
There is an interesting psychological problem here. We commonly assume that imagining ourselves in another person's position will help us understand them better. Research by Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley tested that assumption across 25 experiments. They found little evidence that simply trying to take another person's perspective reliably improved accuracy. In some cases, people became more confident in judgments that were not actually more accurate. What did improve understanding was getting the other person's perspective directly through conversation.
That distinction is important for advocacy.
We do not need to become better at imagining what other people think. We need to become better at finding out.
Understanding Is Not Agreement
Perspective can become difficult the moment an issue carries significant moral weight. If we believe people are being harmed, asking how someone else understands the situation can feel strangely inappropriate. Why should we spend time understanding someone who supports a policy we believe is unjust? Why should someone else's discomfort receive attention when another person's rights, safety, or dignity are at stake?
The answer is not that every perspective is equally valid. It is that every perspective influencing an outcome is strategically relevant.
Understanding why someone opposes us does not require agreeing with their reasoning. Understanding someone's fear does not mean accepting the conclusions they draw from it. Understanding the political pressures facing a decision maker does not require endorsing those pressures. Perspective is information, not surrender.
In fact, refusing to understand someone because we strongly disagree with them can leave us less capable of challenging their position. We may continue answering arguments they are not making, responding to motivations they do not have, or offering evidence that addresses questions they are not asking.
The advantage of perspective is therefore not that it gives us power over someone else. It gives us an advantage over our own assumptions.
That distinction also protects perspective-taking from becoming manipulative. Integrity-Based Advocacy should never be about learning what people care about so we can exploit it. The purpose is to communicate honestly in ways another person can understand, while also listening closely enough to discover where genuine disagreement exists.
Sometimes we will understand someone's perspective perfectly and still disagree profoundly. That is part of living and working in a pluralistic society. The goal is not universal agreement. The goal is to make sure disagreement is actually about the issue rather than about two groups talking past one another.
Translation Is Part of Advocacy
This becomes especially important when we think about persuasion.
People naturally make arguments using the values that persuade them. If fairness motivates me, I am likely to explain an issue through fairness. If compassion motivates me, I may emphasize suffering. If personal freedom is central to how I understand the world, I will probably explain the issue through autonomy and rights.
Then we are surprised when someone who organizes the world differently remains unmoved.
Research on moral reframing has examined this problem directly. Matthew Feinberg and colleagues have found that political arguments can become more persuasive when they are expressed through moral values important to the audience rather than only through the values of the person making the argument.
This is sometimes treated suspiciously, as though changing our language for different audiences is inherently manipulative. I see it differently. Translation is something we do whenever we genuinely want another person to understand us.
Consider an advocate speaking with a local decision maker about a social program. The advocate may be focused primarily on fairness, dignity, and unmet need, while the decision maker is thinking about budget predictability, implementation, public response, and whether the program can survive the next election cycle. Repeating the moral case more forcefully may communicate passion, but it does not necessarily address the decision the other person is being asked to make.
Perspective changes the conversation. The advocate can still make the moral case while also understanding the practical concerns influencing the decision. What will this cost? What objections will have to be answered publicly? What evidence would reduce uncertainty? What would make this proposal politically or organizationally sustainable?
None of those questions dilute the original values. They help move those values into the world.
I have argued before that coalitions require translation because people can support the same outcome for different reasons. Perspective is what makes that translation possible. Effective advocates learn enough about the people they hope to reach that they can communicate without demanding that everyone first adopt the advocate's worldview. That is how ideas move beyond the people who already agree.
Curiosity Is Strategic
Curiosity is often described as a virtue, and I think it is. In advocacy, it is also a strategy.
Imagine entering an important conversation already certain that you understand the other person's motives. You have reduced the number of things you can learn before the conversation has even started. Every response gets filtered through the story you brought into the room.
Curiosity keeps more information available.
What are they actually worried about? What do they believe will happen if they support this? What constituencies or relationships matter to them? What part of our argument do they accept? Where do they think we are wrong? What language causes them to stop listening? What outcome could they support even if their reasons for supporting it are completely different from ours?
Those questions do something important: they turn another person from a category into a source of information.
This matters even when persuasion is unlikely. Advocacy involves far more than changing one person's mind. We need to understand institutions, communities, stakeholders, opposition, potential allies, and people who have not yet decided what they think. Better perspective helps us identify where resistance is firm, where it is conditional, where misunderstanding exists, and where unexpected areas of alignment might be hiding.
It can also correct the caricatures that polarization encourages us to create. Recent research continues to find that perspective-oriented interventions can reduce partisan animosity, in part by restoring some recognition of the humanity of people across political divides. Importantly, feeling warmer toward another person does not automatically mean we understand their political reasoning more accurately.
That is why curiosity has to lead somewhere beyond imagination.
We have to ask.
We have to listen.
We have to allow the answer to complicate the story we arrived with.
The Hard Part Is Letting the Answer Matter
There is a version of listening that advocacy sometimes performs very well. We invite people to speak, hold community conversations, conduct surveys, ask for feedback, and create opportunities for stakeholders to share concerns. Then we proceed exactly as we intended before they spoke.
That is not perspective-getting. It is information collection without influence.
Genuine perspective requires the possibility that something we learn will affect what we do next. Perhaps the goal remains unchanged but the message needs to change. Maybe the policy is sound but the implementation creates a problem we did not anticipate. Perhaps a group we assumed would oppose us actually shares part of our concern. Maybe a criticism we dismissed contains useful information. Perhaps our preferred strategy produces consequences that make our larger goal harder to achieve.
Integrity requires enough confidence in our values to let reality challenge our methods.
That does not mean every objection deserves accommodation. Some demands genuinely conflict with our principles. Some opposition will remain opposition regardless of what we say or do. Advocacy cannot become endless listening while harm continues and decisions go unmade.
But there is an enormous distance between refusing to surrender our principles and refusing to learn anything from people who disagree with us.
The first is conviction.
The second is blindness.
Perspective as a Discipline
Perspective is easy when the stakes are low and the other person is reasonable. Its value becomes clearer when we are frustrated, when the issue feels urgent, and when we believe someone else is deeply wrong.
Those are precisely the moments when our own perception becomes most powerful. Certainty narrows attention. Anger makes motives appear obvious. Group identity gives us ready-made explanations for why "those people" behave the way they do. I have written before about how these dynamics contribute to moral closure, contempt, and advocacy that becomes more invested in affirming itself than expanding its influence.
Perspective interrupts that process.
Before the next important advocacy conversation, it may be worth asking a few uncomfortable questions. What do I actually know about how this person understands the issue, and what am I assuming? What pressures or concerns might be invisible from where I am standing? What would I need to ask rather than guess? Is my message designed to communicate with this person, or primarily to demonstrate my commitment to people who already agree with me? If they leave the conversation unconvinced, will I understand their reasoning better than I did when we started?
Those questions do not ask us to care less about justice.
They ask us to see more of the environment in which justice has to be pursued.
Advocacy will always require people willing to speak clearly about what they believe. It also requires people disciplined enough to understand the world beyond their own perception. Without that, we can become extraordinarily good at explaining ourselves while remaining confused about why nothing changes.
Perhaps that is the shift worth practicing.
Instead of asking only, “How do we make them understand what we see?”
We might also ask, “What do we need to understand about what they see?”
The answer may not change our beliefs.
But it may completely change what we do next.
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