Change the Aperture

My granddaughter was playing with me in my art studio when she discovered an old pair of reader glasses. I have no idea how long they had been lying there or what creative adventure had deposited them among the paints, papers, brushes, beads, scraps, and general glorious mess that accumulates when grandchildren are allowed into an art studio. The lenses were filthy. Fingerprints, smudges, dust — the kind of glasses you would normally hold up to the light, wince, and immediately reach for something to clean them with.

She put them on anyway. Her whole face lit up.

“Grandma! I can see better!”

Well, this got my attention. First, I could barely see through those lenses, so I wasn’t sure how they could possibly be improving anyone’s vision. Second, I was suddenly a concerned grandma, wondering whether my granddaughter had been walking around unable to see properly and none of us knew it. I started asking questions. What could she see better? Was everything clearer? Had things been blurry before? Did she have trouble seeing things far away?

As we talked, she began looking around and experimenting. She would look through the glasses and then over them, through them and then over them again. Slowly, what she had meant became clear. Her vision wasn’t suddenly “better.” A particular range had come into focus. The readers allowed her to see something near her differently, while other things became less clear.

There is something wonderfully innocent about a child putting on a pair of dirty glasses, discovering that one portion of the world has suddenly sharpened, and announcing with complete confidence, I can see better! And there is something profoundly human about it too. We do this all the time. We find a lens that brings some part of reality into extraordinary focus and, because what we can now see is so vivid, so useful, so compelling, we begin to believe we are seeing better.

Maybe we are. And maybe the more interesting question is: What has come into focus, and what has moved out of it? I keep returning to a sentence from Iain McGilchrist because I think it speaks directly into this question:

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance — second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole.” — Iain McGilchrist

We have become extraordinarily skilled at seeing the parts. We divide and differentiate, analyze and categorize, specialize and measure. We can isolate a cell, examine a gene, repair a valve in the human heart, find an error buried in thousands of lines of code, divide enormous organizations into departments and functions, and build entire disciplines around increasingly precise areas of expertise. McGilchrist does not dismiss this capacity; he calls it “of staggering importance.” Clarity, precision, systematic thought, fine discrimination, and reason are capacities we would be foolish to abandon.

I think that matters, especially now, because it would be easy to turn our growing hunger for wholeness into another pendulum swing, another rejection of one way of knowing in favor of another. Human consciousness seems remarkably capable of escaping one polarity by running toward its opposite, only to discover that we have carried the original division with us. We reject competition and idealize collaboration. We become suspicious of analysis and elevate intuition. We criticize hierarchy and romanticize emergence. We tire of individualism and begin speaking almost reverently about the collective. We discover the limitations of reductionism and declare our allegiance to wholeness. Yet if wholeness becomes the side we choose against the parts, we are still wearing one pair of glasses and declaring that now we can see.

There is something much more interesting available to us. We can learn to perceive the part in its particularity while remaining aware of the relationships that make its existence possible. We can become intimate with the micro while retaining a felt sense of the macro. We can differentiate without severing, specialize without isolating, create boundaries without pretending anything inside those boundaries exists independently. We can become more precise and more relational at the same time. This asks more of us than choosing wholeness. It asks us to become capable of moving among scales of reality without losing our awareness of relationship.

The human body makes this almost impossibly beautiful to contemplate. The heart is unmistakably a heart. Its particularity matters. It has chambers and valves, electrical rhythms, muscle fibers, vessels, functions, vulnerabilities, and forms of intelligence specific to its role. The liver does something different. The lungs do something different. The nervous system, kidneys, skin, bones, blood, and microbiome each participate through their own astonishing specialization. The body does not achieve wholeness by asking the liver to become more like the heart or by dissolving the boundaries among its organs. Its wholeness depends upon differentiation. Each participant becomes more valuable to the organism because it contributes something unique and specific that the organism needs.

And still, there is no heart by itself. The moment we try to understand the heart completely, we find ourselves following blood vessels beyond it, tracing signals into the nervous system, studying oxygen arriving through the lungs, hormones traveling through the bloodstream, nutrients metabolized elsewhere, emotional states altering rhythm, movement changing demand, sleep changing repair, relationships changing physiology. We begin with the heart and eventually discover the body. We begin with the body and eventually discover family, culture, food systems, ecosystems, economics, ancestry, microorganisms, atmosphere, Earth. Every time we widen the aperture, what appeared to be a whole reveals itself as a participant within another whole. And when we move closer, what appeared to be a single part reveals worlds within worlds.

This is the nested nature of a living world. A cell, an organ, a person, a family, an ecosystem can each be perceived as a whole, while simultaneously participating within relationships larger than itself. Change the aperture and new relationships come into view. There is no single scale from which we finally see everything. There are wider and narrower fields of relationship, each revealing something the others cannot.

We are always looking through some kind of lens.

That realization changes the question from Am I seeing clearly? to something more humble and useful: What is this particular lens allowing me to see clearly?

Leadership has often rewarded our capacity to narrow the aperture. We identify the problem, isolate the variables, assign responsibility, create the department, establish the metric, measure the outcome, reward the result. These capacities have built extraordinary organizations and produced remarkable human achievement. They are also the same capacities that can allow one department to meet its targets while weakening the organization, a company to increase profitability while transferring costs to a community or ecosystem, or a leader to make a technically sound decision without perceiving what that decision does to the human beings who must live inside it.

The answer cannot simply be to widen the lens and leave it there. The opposite error is possible too. A leader can become so identified with “the whole” — the vision, the movement, the organization, the greater good, the future — that the actual person standing in front of them disappears. Individual suffering becomes collateral damage in service of a noble abstraction. Particularity gets sacrificed to ideology. People become employees, consumers, populations, demographics, stakeholders, human resources, or data points. We can speak eloquently about humanity while failing to see the human being across the table. A wide-angle lens has blind spots too.

This is where presence enters the conversation for me. Presence gives us enough interior spaciousness to notice the lens through which we are looking. It allows us to move close enough to encounter what is actually here while remembering the larger relationships in which it is occurring. A leader may need to understand the spreadsheet and sense what the numbers cannot reveal. She may need to hear the dissenting voice in the meeting and perceive the pattern moving through the group. She may need to attend completely to one frightened employee while also holding responsibility for hundreds of others. She may need to make a decision that works on Tuesday afternoon and remain conscious of the world that decision participates in creating twenty years from now. Leadership at this level requires a kind of perceptual agility — the capacity to move among scales while remaining present to relationship.

I think this is one of the places where our understanding of separation itself can mature. Separation and differentiation are not synonymous. Life differentiates everywhere. A cell has a membrane. A person has a body. An organ has a particular function. Healthy relationships contain boundaries. Ecosystems are filled with distinct species occupying different niches, exchanging resources, competing, cooperating, protecting territory, forming symbiotic relationships, dying, feeding other life, and continually reorganizing. Life does not erase difference in order to achieve wholeness. Life seems to create through difference, with particularity continually finding its meaning within relationship.

This matters enormously when we begin talking about conscious leadership, because so much of our language still carries the architecture of either/or. Individual or collective. Competition or collaboration. Structure or emergence. Reason or intuition. Agency or surrender. Separation or unity. Parts or whole. We keep drawing a line between two realities and then congratulating ourselves when we evolve enough to cross over to the other side. Living systems keep showing us something far more dynamic. A forest needs individual trees and the relationships among them. A symphony needs distinct notes, rests, instruments, rhythms, and musicians, each maintaining enough particularity to contribute to the music. A conversation requires distinct voices precisely so something can arise among them that none could create alone.

Our evolution may involve becoming increasingly capable of holding distinction without manufacturing separation. That asks us to become more fully ourselves and more conscious of the relationships through which our lives become possible. Autonomy and belonging, agency and conscious participation, boundaries and connection can mature together. The individual does not have to disappear for the collective to become coherent, and the collective does not have to dominate for the individual to contribute meaningfully. Something richer becomes possible when we understand ourselves as distinct participants within living systems of relationship.

This is also why I have become cautious about leadership language that suggests we can somehow “embody the whole.” The whole exceeds our perception. Every leader sees from somewhere. Every worldview has an aperture. Every strategy illuminates certain relationships while leaving others outside the frame. Even our most sophisticated systems maps are still maps, representations of a living reality more intricate than the lines we have drawn around it. Wholeness asks for humility alongside vision: the humility to know that whatever we can see is nested within relationships we cannot completely see, and that someone standing in another position may be perceiving something our own aperture cannot reveal.

That humility does not diminish mastery. I think it deepens it. Expertise remains valuable. Strategy remains necessary. Metrics tell us important things. Structure gives form to intention. Roles clarify responsibility. Boundaries protect integrity. Analysis helps us discriminate among possibilities, and intuition can alert us to patterns we have not yet consciously understood. Our evolutionary movement can include all of these capacities within a more relational mastery, allowing precision, intuition, imagination, synthesis, discernment, and systems awareness to inform one another while remaining accountable to a reality larger than any one way of knowing.

Maybe this is why that afternoon in the art studio has stayed with me. My granddaughter did something very simple once she began questioning her original conclusion. She looked through the glasses. Then she looked over them. Then she looked through them again. She changed the aperture. There was no crisis in discovering that the glasses helped her see one thing and made something else harder to see. She simply became curious about what each view revealed.

There is wisdom in that movement. We can come close enough to see the cell and pull back far enough to remember the body. We can attend to the person and the culture, the quarterly decision and the generational consequence, the immediate need and the emerging future. We can become exquisitely skilled at our particular work while remembering that our work is always entering a web of relationships already in motion. We can notice when the lens through which we have been looking has become so familiar that we have mistaken it for reality itself. And then we can look again.

McGilchrist’s words leave me thinking that our next evolution in leadership may have less to do with finding the one correct way of seeing and more to do with becoming conscious of how we see. We focus and widen. We distinguish and reconnect. We examine and listen. We act and notice what our action changes. We move among scales with enough humility to know that there is no final aperture from which everything becomes visible, because the wholeness of a living universe will always exceed the view from any one place within it.

The heart remains a heart. The forest remains filled with trees. You remain irreducibly you, and I remain irreducibly me. Yet none of us has ever existed alone. The part becomes intelligible through relationship; the whole becomes tangible through its particular expressions. Somewhere within that living movement, a more mature form of leadership becomes possible — one capable of precision and wonder, agency and humility, discernment and belonging, deep presence and an ever-widening awareness of the life in which we are participating.

I can still see my granddaughter in my art studio, those ridiculously smudged reader glasses perched on her little face, absolutely delighted by what had suddenly appeared.

“Grandma, I can see better!”

Maybe she could. And maybe the wisdom isn’t in finding the glasses that finally allow us to see everything clearly. Maybe it is learning to notice what comes into focus through the lens we are wearing, what disappears beyond its edges, and when life is asking us to look over the top of our glasses and change the aperture.

Because every time we widen the view, we discover more relationship. And in that widening, we begin to understand something that was true all along: we were never merely looking at the whole. We were participating in it.