Evelyn Rodriguez is in very expansive mode over at Crossroads Dispatches, and recently wrote about her meeting with a marketing guy at gotomedia.com, whose tagline is:
Ask, and people will guess at what they do. Watch them, and you'll know.
And
she quotes Gay Talese as saying that his interviews with people are
initially quite meaningless, until he has observed them for awhile. So
to some extent, he says, interviewing people who speak a different
language is no harder than interviewing those who speak your own. Most
of the meaning is picked up in the observation, and most of the
journalist's value is in reporting what was observed, not what was said.
This, of course, is Cultural Anthropology
101. From the point of view of a business, the key to disruptive
innovation is social insight. The minute you discover something
important about your customers that no one else has picked up on, and
that perhaps the customers themselves have not articulated, your
competitors should be very, very afraid.
I see this in my
observations in nature as well. The squirrels learned how to defeat my
baffles through one part trial-and-error, one part creative thinking,
and one part observing, paying attention
to every aspect of the challenge at hand. The ritual circular sniffing
of dogs when they meet is merely an introduction to a profound process
of mutually paying attention. I sometimes think our language is to some
extent a distraction from paying attention, or even an excuse for not
paying attention to people we are in the company of. Contrast that with
the behaviours of new lovers, who are observing and paying attention to
each other to an almost excruciating degree. They pick up, and even neutral observers nearby
pick up, non-verbal signals and nuances of communication as subtle as
the dilation of the pupils and the rhythm of breathing, the more
complex rise and fall of voice and the non-verbal gurgles and trills
between words -- expressions rarely apparent in 'normal' human spoken
conversation because there's no point in them if no one is paying
attention.
I believe instinctively that all animal communications are that rich and that subtle, because they are so much
better at paying attention than we are. They must perceive us as
unbelievably insensitive, almost unconscious by comparison. Yet we call
them 'dumb' animals.
I recently wrote something that I think (immodestly) is quite profound in Jane Crow Journal where there was some light-hearted discussion of what women (and men) really want. I said:
I
think what most of us want, male and female, human and other, is
attention and appreciation. Everything else is derivative of those two
things.
It's really all about attention, and paying attention. The attention we pay to others, and that others pay to us, defines
us, far more than our appearance or our name. And how can we appreciate
what someone (a life partner, a business partner, a customer, an
employee, a friend, a foe) is about and has to offer unless and until
we pay attention to her, really listen and observe
with (as much as is humanly possible) no judgement, no personal filters
or frames impeding. And once weve paid enough attention that we really
understand that person (or for that matter, that creature of any
species), how can we not appreciate her?
That's
the simplest explanation I can provide for how we have lost touch with
nature, and why we see the environment as 'other' and fail to appreciate
its immense importance. We have lost the ability to pay attention to
it, as language and other blunter tools of learning and appreciation
have replaced observation and paying attention in human behaviour. And
when we no longer appreciate it, we are content to allow it to be
destroyed, until one day we can't observe and appreciate it anymore.
"Oh it always seems to be, we don't what we've got 'til its gone", as
Joni Mitchell put it.
Things are the way they are for a reason.
Watch, listen, observe, pay attention, and you will know that reason.
Most genius, most innovation, most emotion, I am convinced, stems from
this 'first-hand' knowledge.
This is the skill, more than any other, that I need to learn.
Photo from the Ontario SPCA.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
