Observation

How to Use Your Eyes

Our eyes are far too good for us. They show us so much that we can't take it all in, so we shut out most of the world, and try to look at things as briskly and efficiently as possible.

James Elkins, How to Use Your Eyes

Seeing a Situation for What it Is

A big part of my work involves trying to make sense of a situation. Usually, people come with a story of something that has happened or is happening, and the story contains the core elements of a challenge that needs a resolution. But before I can make sense of a situation, I need to see it for what it is as best I can.

Maybe I have an unusual way of looking at things, but in this complex, changing and increasingly digital world, I thought to share how I try to go about it. No doubt I have an objective bias, which is why I like to work with human behavior experts whenever possible, so we can bring some objective/ subjective balance back into play when it's time to act.

This is my attempt to arrange how I see things - or create a reliable taxonomy of any situation. Why bother? Because no matter how complex or dynamic a situation, some elements are timeless, unconditional and universal and we need to find them to put down lasting foundations in shifting sands. There's no linear flow implied in the order of the sections. Like the movie title says, "it's everything, everywhere, all at once." (And thanks to Ed Brenegar (comment below) for his guidance in this regard.)

This post focuses on the first phase of designing something: Observation. The subsequent phases as I see them are Understanding and Making. I'm not going to cover them in this post.

Multiple Perspectives

Stories are important because they let us share information in a way that creates emotional connection. But sometimes stories can get in the way because a narrative is unreliable or their emotional perspectives are subjective. A story is an account of connected events, constructed from a particular perspective. And what I've learned about complex situations is that they contain?multiple?perspectives, all of which are valid to those who hold them. (And good storytelling usually eschews this kind of ‘God’s eye view’ in a scene that allows an audience to observe more than the characters can themselves.)

So I try to start the process of sense-making by stripping away subjective narrative to observe two very clinical elements - a System and its Dynamics.

Systems

A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole.?

My team or organization is a system. The project or initiative I'm working on is a system. Systems contain subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, and motion: things that are in (work)flow, and things that are stocked up ready to be deployed, like staff or assets or materials. By understanding the extent of the system, we get to see its reach and scope and potential. We get to understand the stakeholders, entities, interactions, decisions and actions that shape it.?

Each system has its own limited set of essential, primary parameters. So for example, when I worked in IT on data back up and recovery, the four primary parameters of the system were:

?????????????Time

?????????????Risk

?????????????Cost

?????????????Performance

Dynamics

Dynamics?are the behavior of bodies, relevant to the factors that affect them in a system.

Dynamics explain the nature of how system elements are deployed and how they shape the system. They explain the behavior of people, assets and materials in the system and the prevailing conditions that shape the effective operation of the system.

Human-centered initiatives like Psychological Safety, DEI, Empathy,??that ‘Best Places to Work’ initiative and all those satisfaction surveys you take - these are all efforts to observe, understand and build dynamics that support the strategic direction of the organization (aka System).

Features & Conditions

Features are elements in a system that influence it with their own specific dynamics. For example, a river is a feature on the landscape (a system) that determines, among other things, how people can interact with the landscape. Is it fast or slow? Narrow or wide? Shallow or deep? Where can it be crossed? Can it be dammed to generate power? All of these dynamics have a bearing on the conditions - circumstances such as performance, efficiency, productivity etc. - affecting different actors in the system.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics is the study of the relationship between people and their working environment and the degree to which human dynamics can impact the system, positively or negatively. While we might often think of ergonomics in terms of physical health and safety, the term?Organizational Ergonomics?refers to the human dynamics of engagement in teams and groups. It is its own particular set of dynamics caused by people (and people are features of the system!)

Rather than explore the nuances of a narrative, and being drawn towards a perspective or bias, it serves me better just to understand that I am dealing with a System and with Dynamics - shaped by prevailing behaviors. I don’t have to make sense of them, just identify them.

If all of this sounds very abstract and generic it’s because underneath every story we have to tell, every hope and every injustice, every success and every failure, every vision, mission and goal, every rich and somatic experience, lie the timeless, universal and the?unconditional: the interplay of dynamics within a system, observed in clinical terms as: nouns and verbs and direction (towards or away from a stated objective), as well as a sense of momentum, available capacity and a timeframe.?

Dispassionate Observation

When you can look at a situation dispassionately, you can observe it more easily because you remove emotion. You don’t get pulled towards one perspective or another because you understand that the system dynamics contain factors belonging to?all?the perspectives. The ‘whole’ system is characterized by all of the essential elements, features and dynamics active within it. But even all of those can be made more manageable when we remember that we are dealing with just a small number of core components:

• Entities involved (Nouns)
• Actions taken (Verbs)
• Momentum that moves towards or away from something (Direction)
• Assets as they are in states of motion (Flow)
• Assets as they are stockpiled (Capacity)
• Feedback loops (Engagement)
• The speed of a process (Time)

Sort and Classify fewer Variables

It takes a surprisingly small set of variables to understand the basic outline of a system. It takes time and a certain shift in thinking to get beyond narratives to a clinical observation of Systems, Dynamics and Organizational Ergonomics. But when we do, we find new ways to sort and then classify the things that we observe - and we find that instead of their being innumerable measures of both, there are in fact just a few - around 10 - variables in just three dimensions. The sorting and classification is essential. And being able to simplify the situational landscape for the purposes of observation helps to make sense-making (and life) a heck of a lot simpler to get your head around.

Put the Human back In

To wrap, it's critical to put the Human behavioral elements back in. Like any good facilitator, we can’t lose sight of how people engage with the objective world, which facilitators capture neatly with the ‘ORID’ process. ORID stands for:

?????????????O:??????Objective -??“What?”?(Senses)

?????????????R:??????Reflective -? Gut?(Heart)

?????????????I:???????Interpretive -??“So what?”?(Head)

?????????????D:??????Decisional -???“Now what?”?(Action)

Nothing in the world functions objectively. So to stress, I try to bring an objective bias in the observation phase, so that when we move from Observing to Understanding, we can be sure to factor in the complex human dynamics. If you don't, you won't actually achieve anything when you move to action.

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I'd welcome your thoughts and feedback and opportunities to learn about any of these themes.

Thank you for reading!