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April 27 - May 9, 2018
Leonardo da Vinci attributed all of his scientific and artistic accomplishments to the same concept, which he called saper vedere (“sah-PEAR veh-DARE-ay”)—“knowing how to see.” We might also call his gift “visual intelligence.”
Art of Perception program—I call them “the four As”—how to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt.
A 2005 study at King’s College at London University found that when distracted, workers suffered a ten- to fifteen-point IQ loss—a greater dumbing down than experienced when smoking marijuana. A fifteen-point deficiency is significant, as it brings an adult male down to the same IQ level as an eight-year-old child.
Portable technology is not just a sensory distraction; we allow it to be a sensory substitution.
George de Mestral, Betsy Kaufman, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci all believed that invention is less about creation than it is about discovery.
If the speaker’s sharp senses and rapid-fire delivery of his deductions sound like Sherlock Holmes, it is for good reason: he was the real-life inspiration for the fictional detective. Dr. Joseph Bell, a professor of surgery, prolific writer, and a relative of Alexander Graham Bell, enthralled his young student Arthur Conan Doyle with his uncanny and uncommon yet in his words “elementary” talents.
In the early 1980s, Philadelphia physician Arthur Lintgen received international attention when he demonstrated his uncanny ability to “read” vinyl records on a television show.
I had a student at the University of Virginia School of Nursing come up to me following a presentation and confess that she found the common medical practice of “charting by exception” unduly constraining. Meant to streamline medical record keeping and make it easier to quickly review trends, charting by exception instructs personnel to document only unusual findings or exceptions to the norm. As a result, doctors and nurses are tempted to limit what they look for, especially if the chart is already filled with WDLs (“within defined limits”) from previous shift workers.
No two jobs, classrooms, crime scenes, customers, students, patients, people, or problems are the same. There is no such thing as the same pneumonia, the same second-grader, or the same business deal. Every person and situation is unique. To treat them otherwise is to deceive them and ourselves.
When looking at anything—a painting, a patient’s room, our peers at a party, a public square, or a line of people at the airport—we must study it using the same basic model of information gathering employed by journalists, law enforcement agents, and scientific researchers: who, what, when, and where.
Noting the facts of your location—what’s around you or the subject of any scene you are studying—can be critical or even life-saving if something unexpected happens. Knowing where the emergency exits are in a darkened theater, which are the exit rows on a plane, or where the storm shelter or strongest doorway is in the event of a natural disaster can make all the difference. Situational awareness is imperative for decision making in many situations from air traffic control and emergency services to driving a car or maneuvering a bicycle along a busy street.
There is a significant difference between reporting that a child is “covered in bruises” and “has three dime-size, round, yellow and purple bruises just under the kneecap, one on the left leg and two on the right.” The latter could probably be said for the majority of active kids because of how often they bang their shins. Other places, such as the face, head, neck, and buttocks, are not normal bruising sites. The color and shape of bruises can be just as telling as their location. Round bruises typically result from bumping into something. Long, rectangular, or hand-shaped bruises do not.
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Even during the seemingly mundane ritual of greeting and seating passengers, the cabin crew are also on the lookout for what the International Civil Aviation Organization calls ABPs, or “able-bodied passengers”—people they can count on to assist in an emergency. There must be three ABPs per exit.
An ABP must be over fifteen years of age; have sufficient mobility, strength, and dexterity in both arms, hands, and legs; be able to read, understand, and communicate in English; not require a seat belt extension; and not be traveling with anyone else, since people are more likely to help their family members before assisting strangers.
And it’s a telling detail not to be missed, since the artist Copley, so diligent in his re-creation of the reflection in the mahogany table, would likely not leave out such an item accidentally. There are no records of why Copley omitted the ring in the table’s reflection. It could be a comment on the state of Mrs. Winthrop’s marriage, or it could simply be the artist playing a visual game with the viewer.
For our purposes, COBRA—which stands for Camouflaged, One, Break, Realign, Ask—will help us uncover hidden details by reminding us to concentrate on the camouflaged, work on one thing at a time, take a break, realign our expectations, and ask someone else to look with us.
I’ve found that people who don’t ask for assistance are often afraid doing so will make them seem incompetent, but I think the opposite is true. Someone else might see the answer to the problem that we articulated, and by seeking another set of eyes, we are proving that we are dedicated to the pursuit of a solution.
To remind one another to keep looking constantly in every direction, World War II pilots came up with a phrase still used in the army (I’ve heard that football coaches are also fond of it): keep your head on a swivel. Instead of defaulting to what’s right in front of us, we must keep shifting our perspective. Doing so can help us find more information, more of the story, the missing piece, the right path, the true intent, or even the way out.
The importance of seeing things from all angles doesn’t begin and end with investigative work; it’s just as critical for any business that trades in process, products, or people. It’s the key principle behind Toyota’s famous genchi genbutsu concept—which translates to “go and see”: the idea that the only way to get the comprehensive picture of a scene, see a process as a whole, and absorb as many details as possible is for managers to leave their offices, get out from behind their computers, and physically go to where the work is being done. Many manufacturing companies have adopted this in a
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The more unfamiliar the territory you traverse, the more potential there is for you to refocus your perceptions and break out of what psychologists call “functional fixedness,” or the habit of seeing things from only one perspective.
Shifting our perspective lets us see things for the first time or see things anew. The process can help us find both tiny details and earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting ideas, and you can use that information to solve problems and uncover new possibilities.
To remind themselves to start a story with the most salient piece of information, journalists say: “Don’t bury the lede.”
Different prioritization systems will work better for different people. The one I’ve found to be the most helpful to the widest range of people I teach is the three-prong approach outlined in the CIA training manual The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard J. Heuer. To help organize data and find the most important elements of any situation, you ask three questions: What do I know? What don’t I know? If I could get more information, what do I need to know?
Identifying the pertinent negative helps give our observations more specificity. By articulating what is conspicuously absent, we are giving a more precise description of what we perceive. When we purposefully state the pertinent negative, we are more accurate.
Many people leave out what they don’t know because they mistakenly think it shows ignorance or a lack of hard work. Asking the question “What don’t I know?” is not the same as throwing out an “I don’t know.” In truth what you are saying is, “No one right here right now knows, and I was observant enough to notice this important fact and open it up for others to help me find the answer.” If we reframe our attitude about it, others will follow.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was well known for prioritizing his daily duties by sifting the urgent from the important; time management experts today still recommend the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. Brett McKay and his wife, Kate McKay, authors of the best-selling Art of Manliness advice book series, explain why it’s so effective: “Urgent tasks put us in a reactive mode, one marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly focused mindset . . . When we focus on important activities we operate in a responsive mode, which helps us remain calm, rational, and open to new opportunities.”
Sculptor and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Teresita Fernández articulated it this way: “Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth, the size of the world you make for yourselves, your ability to influence the things you believe in, your obsessions, your failures—all of these components will also become the raw material for the art you make.”
Another trick to help curb the subjective is to replace exclusive words with inclusive. Instead of saying, “This doesn’t work for me,” instead use “What if you tried . . . ?” or better yet, include yourself in the team with “Why don’t we try . . . ?”
Installation artist and photographer JR explains that art is about “raising questions, and giving space to interpretation and dialogue. The fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables it to change the world.”
Just as with observation skills, the most important thing we can do to sharpen our communication skills, especially in times of stress or duress, is to separate the objective from the subjective.
Early in my first communication from him, he wrote, “My notes take a very matter-of-fact tone, but please imagine a ‘please’ in front of all of them. I use a very direct style in my marginal notes for the sake of clarity and efficiency, and I apologize in advance if any of them veer into brusqueness.” Those two sentences at the start of our professional relationship made months of otherwise hard-to-hear critiques not just bearable but many times delightful because he had dismissed any doubts I had about his intentions.
“I used to dread it when I knew I had to have one,” she told me. “If I had to give a bad performance review or terminate someone, I would be sick for days beforehand, worrying about it. But what I learned from concentrating on the objective and leaving the subjective by the wayside is that facts give confidence. Facts are the truth. I found security and confidence knowing I was going to only have to deal with facts.”
THREE RULES FOR WORKING WITH (AND AROUND) OUR BIASES Rule 1: Become Aware of Our Biases and Boot the Bad Ones
Rule 2: Don’t Mistake Biases for Facts; Instead Use Them to Find Facts
Rule 3: Run Our Conclusions Past Others
