Fresh Eyes Effect
In my previous company, I observed how recruiters worked very closely. The story they told to potential hires, the promises they made, the way outreach was done, the emails they wrote to candidates in the days leading up to them joining, and so on.
It’s interesting how templatized things become when you do them for the 1000th time. You start operating on autopilot and lose the creative touch.
When we were looking at hiring designers, we made it a design challenge. Over a casual discussion about this, we asked what if we challenged the way it was done today and flipped the method? A complete 180. Like not asking for a portfolio. Maybe evaluating them on a different axis altogether. What if we checked them for their attitude towards design instead of artifacts? What if we shared more of what we were about instead of expecting them to tell us more about them?
If you start thinking this way, you realize that almost all the work around us can be done differently. And often it gives us outcomes we couldn’t predict in a positive way. It’s almost like the power of 180. Look at how you’ve been doing something all this time, and imagine doing it completely in the opposite way.
What if we skipped writing that JD altogether? We know most people don’t read them and the writers don’t think hard about writing good ones anyway. What if we candidly shared the comp bands when we know most companies don’t?
It’s an interesting approach. I call it the Fresh Eyes Effect. Taking a look at something with completely fresh eyes and defying everything about a domain that has long been accepted as the norm.
The pattern you keep seeing
Once you start noticing this, you see it everywhere. Your sales teams sending the same cold emails that everyone ignores. Your marketing teams running campaigns the way they’ve always run campaigns, being okay with less than 1% email open rates and never wondering why they couldn’t bump that up to 3-4%. Customer support reps going through the same boring playbook that was defined 3 years ago and was never updated.
Everyone ends up operating on autopilot because creative function of the brain requires energy. And we love conserving it as humans. The better you get at something, the more likely you are to get stuck in these patterns.
Notice how often engineers have the best design feedback. Data scientists probably end up giving you much better product growth ideas than product managers can. Designers often have suggestions to optimize load times of a page better than the engineer working on it.
Why fresh eyes work
I can think of a few reasons why fresh eyes help break away from the usual patterns.
But 3 reasons specifically jump out:
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Creativity decays over time. As humans we naturally stop having good ideas in the same domain over time. Creativity is also a function of energy as we saw above. It’s hard to continue to push yourself to come up with better and more unique solutions over time. Sometimes, you just need a fresh pair of eyes.
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Problems become invisible when you live with them daily. People do get numb from the same problems over time. It’s like that squeaky door in your house after a while, you don’t hear it anymore. Fresh eyes can often notice what you’ve got accustomed to ignore.
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Expertise creates invisible walls. The better you get, the better you become at knowing what “can’t” be done. But the fresh eyes person doesn’t carry that history. They don’t know what’s impossible, so they end up considering solutions that usually get filtered out in the expert’s brain.
The power of 180
The point is to be able to think differently in order to reimagine a function, and that can usually be done by someone not working under any constraints or baggage.
Every few months, ask someone from a completely different area to look at something you do. Tell them: “Forget how this is supposed to work. Look at it through what you know and tell me what you see.”
The results will consistently surprise you. Not because these people are smarter than your domain experts, but because they see possibilities that you’ve become blind to.
Sometimes just flip everything. If everyone asks for portfolios, don’t ask for portfolios. If everyone writes long job descriptions, don’t write them at all. If everyone hides compensation, be completely transparent.
The 180 approach forces you to question basic assumptions that everyone takes for granted. And often, those assumptions are just inherited practices that nobody’s questioned in years.
The most innovative solutions don’t come from people who know the domain best. They come from people who know something else really well and aren’t afraid to apply it somewhere new.
Try it. Ask someone from a completely different area to look at something you do every day. I guarantee they’ll see something you’ve been missing.