Seeing is not observing

@anniemurphypaul advises us how to increase our powers of observation - by emulating scientists. "As practiced by scientists", she writes, "observation is a rigorous activity that integrates what the scientists are seeing with what they already know and what they think might be true."

Here are some tips that she draws from an article by Eberbach and Crowley.

• Train your attention. Practise focusing on relevant features. 

• Keep field notes - careful records of your observations, quantifying them whenever possible. Try attaching a number to each episode you observe: how many times a customer picks up an item before deciding to buy it, how many minutes employees spend talking about office politics before getting down to business. 

• Develop hypotheses that you can test. What happens if a salesperson invites a potential customer to try out a product for herself? How does the tone of the weekly meeting change when it’s held in a different room? 

• Extended reflection. Actively engage with your observations after the event, organizing and analyzing what you've seen 

• Cycle. Engage in the cycle of observing, recording, testing, and analyzing many times over. 

It may be useful here to distinguish between Field Notes and a Field Journal. Field Notes contain a record of what has been seen or heard by the observer. Whereas the Field Journal contains a record of ideas, thoughts, interpretations and other material. In particular, the Field Journal records anything else that was going on at the time, which later reflection may determine to have influenced the observations.

Sheldon Greaves outlines the approach adopted by Joseph Grinnell, who kept detailed records of his observations from 1894 to 1939, and who was Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley for most of that time.

"The idea behind the Grinnell system is to turn you from a passive recorder of information into a participant in a dialogue with nature. Rather than just recording bits of data, you poke, explore and cross-examine nature in order to sluice nuggets of knowledge from what you see."

But in her review of Molly Gloss's short story The Grinnell method (Sept 2012), Maureen Kincaid Speller offers a detailed critique of the Grinnell method for observing human affairs, and complains that "there seems to be no place in Grinnell’s method for analysis, just the ongoing accumulation of information".

Which is clearly why we also need extended reflection.

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Annie Murphy Paul, How To Increase Your Powers of Observation (Time Ideas, May 2012)

Catherine Eberbach, Kevin Crowley From Everyday to Scientific Observation: How Children Learn to Observe the Biologist’s World (abstract) Review of Educational Research March 2009 vol. 79 no. 1 39-68 doi: 10.3102/0034654308325899

Cathryn Carson, Writing, Writing, Writing: The Natural History Field Journal as a Literary Text (Feb 2007)

Jamie Cromertie, How to keep your field notes and journal,

Sheldon Greaves, Making, Maintaining, and Using Serious Field Notes (Feb 2012)

Paul Handford, Notes on Keeping a Field Journal,

Betsy Mason, Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Field Notes (Wired Science, July 2011)

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Places are still available on my Organizational Intelligence workshop, November 22nd.

Walking in my son's shoes

This week my 15-year-old son has been doing "work experience". A lot of new experiences for him: travelling into Central London on his own; spending the day with adults he hardly knew; a much longer day than a normal day at school, with an entirely different rhythm of work.

One lunchtime he met a schoolmate along the street, who was doing his work experience at a hospital in another part of London. (His father is a doctor.)

My first thought was: how unlikely is that? I have been to Central London many thousands of times, and I have hardly ever met people I knew in the street. (Not counting people working in the same building or heading for the same event.)

But not so fast. The streets are full of people, but most of them are adults. Although there are lots of kids on work experience this week, these only amount to a tiny fraction of the total street population. Some more perceptive adults may notice that there are more kids around than usual; meanwhile the kids possibly pay more attention to each other than to the adults. So if there are two 15-year-old boys in a crowded street, they are perhaps more likely to see each other than two 45-year old men would. Just a theory, but it would help explain the improbable event of my son's meeting his schoolmate.

Of course, we don't always have to find an explanation for something just because it seems unlikely. But an unlikely event often stimulates this kind of enquiry. Note how my hypothesis required me to creatively imagine how a crowded street in Central London might look to my son.

Perhaps more generally, people who have something in common (born in the same village, similar vices, or whatever) have a higher than random chance of meeting in a crowd. Or it might be that we only remember those meetings that have a greater significance. Fiction often picks out such meetings, and some authors build elaborate plots around unlikely coincidences; but we may not wish to take fiction (or human memory, which is sometimes barely distinguishable from fiction) as a reliable guide to the significance of everyday life.