Business Needs a New Perspective: raceAhead
If we’re ever going to achieve full equity and inclusion, we will need to change the way we look at things.
What if the mantra of business was not to, in modern tech-industry speak, move fast and break things, but to slow down and understand them?
This is one of the underlying themes of “To Scale: The Solar System,” a beautiful seven minute video shot by filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh.
“Every single picture of the solar system that we ever encounter is not to scale,” begins Overstreet. If you plotted our sun and neighboring planets on a piece of paper like most school kids do, you wouldn’t be able to see anything at all: The heavenly bodies would be microscopic. Every photo, every image, every rendering we’ve ever seen is not only wrong, it gives us an oversized idea of our own place in the galaxy.
In fact, if you held up a blue marble and called it Earth, you’d need seven miles of empty land to draw an accurate representation of the solar system.
Which is exactly what Overstreet and Gorosh did in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. In a delicious irony, the land they used is also the home of the annual Silicon Valley fixation known as the Burning Man festival.
The film is a charming quest to give anyone who hasn’t traveled to the moon a sense of how impossibly large the universe is, an analog adventure in basic math and measurement. The result is deeply humbling and oddly comforting.
“We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing,” says Wiley. “When you sort of come face to face with that, it’s staggering.”
I flag this for you not as a solar system truther, but as a tonic for the weary traveler struggling to put a whole host of things into a more meaningful perspective—like why or whether it matters that the history of slavery becomes central to the origin narrative of the U.S.
Or why or whether it matters that corporations have shifted their singular focus on “shareholder value” to center other goals like “investing in employees,” fostering “diversity and inclusion,” “dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers,” “supporting the communities in which we work,” and “protect[ing] the environment.”
Perhaps it will come to pass—to stick with my celestial theme until the bitter end—that observing things from different perspectives will change the observer, not the other way around.
Overstreet and Gorosh created an even shorter film that touches on this phenomenon, another tonic for inclusion-minded people.
“A New View of The Moon” captures three minutes of what happens when you drag a super cool telescope around Los Angeles and let all sorts of very different people take a look at their common moon. “It makes you realize that we are all on a small little planet and we all have the same reaction to the universe we live in,” says Overstreet.
And how much we lose when we focus on the wrong things.
Wow. Oh my God, don’t miss it.