Part 5 (1/2)

3. We Saw Position in s.p.a.ce-the Where Meanwhile, a third part of our vision system was simultaneously occupied with noticing where all these objects and quant.i.ties were located, both in relation to us and in relation to one another. We saw that our friend was maybe twenty feet ahead of us and toward the right, for example, and that the dog was at our friend's foot level, but just beyond. We saw that the baby carriage was way over there to the left, and the bird was another twenty or thirty feet past that.

We also saw that all these objects were solidly attached to the earth, and that even though they were all grounded on the same horizontal plane, we had no trouble noticing what was in front of what, what was next to what, and we could even estimate the distances between everything.

Instantly recognizing these objects' positions in s.p.a.ce was entirely distinct from simultaneously recognizing the objects. The nearest person to us may have been our friend, but her proximity had no bearing on her being our friend: She would have been the same friend even if she'd been the character farthest away. Likewise, the fact that there was a good distance between the dog and the bird didn't alter the fact that one was a bird and the other was not.

Our minds were completely capable of seeing the who simultaneously and yet independently of the where, and it turns out that that's not just academically interesting; it's actually the way we're neurologically wired. Studies in neurobiology over the past few years have revealed that two vastly different pathways in our brain's vision system account for identifying objects' positions and for identifying the objects themselves.

The first pathway has been given the wonderfully descriptive (and thankfully unscientific) name ”the where pathway,” and it identifies the parts of our brain that help us visually determine our own spatial orientation and the position of objects around us. Much of this visual processing takes place in an evolutionarily ancient part of our brain known as the reptilian brain, or brain stem, and much of the processing-if we recall the precognitive attributes we discussed in the previous chapter-takes place long before we have any conscious awareness of even knowing what we're looking at.

The second pathway, which has the equally descriptive name ”the what pathway,” is composed of visual processing centers located in the evolutionarily newer outer layers of our brain known as the neocortex. The what pathway-not surprisingly-is responsible for identifying things and attaching names to them.*

We've accounted for three independent yet interrelated ways of seeing: who/what, how much, and where. We're halfway done. Did you notice how the ways of seeing correspond to the 6 W's? That relations.h.i.+p is going to continue for the remaining three, but with a slight difference: While the first three ways of seeing are instantaneous, the next three depend on the pa.s.sage of time.

4. We Saw Position in Time-the when As we let our scene play out, our characters and objects moved about. Our friend walked a little, the dog jumped more, and the bird may have flown away entirely. We know this because while the various parts of our vision system were working on what we were seeing, how many there were, and where they were, yet another part (or perhaps several parts-n.o.body is entirely sure how this neurologically happens) was keeping track of the objects and their positions as they moved over time. In the case of the baby carriage for example, at the beginning of our exercise we saw it in one place, but by the end it was in a different place: Over the couple minutes' time of the exercise, it had changed location. And yet our eyes didn't question whether it was a different carriage just because at one point in time it was here and at another point in time it was there. We knew it was the same carriage because our eyes knew that we were literally seeing time pa.s.s by.

Had we observed for several more minutes, we would have seen the carriage visually change in other ways. It would have become smaller as it moved farther away, it would have changed shape as its angle from our eyes s.h.i.+fted, and if we'd been able to watch for a really long time, it might even have changed color as its paint faded in the sun. But no matter how long we watched-as long as we stayed on the scene-we'd still see it as the same carriage.

Seeing the when is different from the three ways we've already discussed. While we saw the who/what, how much, and where instantly, to see when demands that at least some time pa.s.s. As obvious as that sounds, it's an important idea that has real ramifications for how we see and represent things that change over time. We can (and often do) make immediate visual judgments about objects, number, and spatial position, but we can't do the same when it comes to how things change. To see when, we have to see at least two different points in time-before and after, now and then, yesterday and today, etc.

5. We Saw Influence and Cause and Effect-the how Up to this point, the four ways of seeing have been largely independent. Our eyes saw and processed who and what separately from where and when. But as we watched our scene unwind over time and saw our characters and objects s.h.i.+ft their positions in s.p.a.ce, something else happened: We started to see chains of related events and the impact of one thing upon another. In other words, we saw how. If our friend's dog lunged toward the bird, any of several things could have occurred. Perhaps our friend yanked the leash and caught the dog up short; perhaps the dog snapped our friend forward; perhaps the dog bolted, leaving our friend in the dust.

No matter what took place, we saw cause and effect in action: The dog did something (ran, barked, jumped) that forced our friend to do something in response (fall down, yell at the dog, jump even farther). Our eyes saw all of this and compared it to what we expected would happen-based on similar cause-and-effect scenes we'd seen in the past-and confirmed that the world still made sense. In the unlikely event that the dog suddenly sprouted wings and flew or our friend teleported to the other side of the park, our eyes would have been very surprised, and we would have had to rea.s.sess how our world works.

Like when, seeing how requires the pa.s.sage of time, long enough for at least a little cause and effect to be visible. But unlike the other ways of seeing, how isn't something we distinctly see on its own. Hows are usually combinations of whos, whats, how muchs, wheres, and whens all rolled up together. In other words, the first four W's serve as the raw materials that we build together in order to see how things happen.

Our eyes visually deduce how by observing the interactions of the first four W's.

This means that of the five ways we've covered so far, hows are the most challenging to see: They don't appear immediately, and they require that we see (and visually combine) at least two or more of the previous W's first. We'll come back to this point several more times as we apply all this to real problem solving, but first we've got one more way to see.

6. We Saw All of This Come Together and ”Knew” Something About Our Scene-the Why Friends, dogs, baby carriages, birds, objects, positions, locations, changes over time, influences, causes and effects: For a simple exercise that took just a few minutes, we certainly saw a lot. And by seeing the objects, measuring their attributes and numbers, determining their positions and sizes, tracking countless changes to them over time, and detecting interactions between them, we came to know something about our world. In fact, we've started down the path of seeing why.

Perhaps we don't yet know from our little scene precisely why birds fly away from dogs or not, or why a leash is an effective way of keeping a dog from cras.h.i.+ng into a baby carriage, but given what we've seen, we won't be able to stop ourselves from making some guesses. Whether those guesses will turn out to be right or wrong will be answered only by observing similar scenes over and over, and seeing if they end up the same way.

But the truly amazing part of our vision system is how often our guesses turn out to be right. Bird-dog drills are entering our eyes every second of every waking moment, and it's staggering how rarely we make a mistake in keeping track of the whos, whats, wheres, etc. Most of us would probably struggle to recall times when we fundamentally misidentified someone or something, profoundly confused the positions of objects in s.p.a.ce, or saw time flow in the wrong direction. It's not that these things can't happen; it's just that if they do, we become intensely aware of them, since they run counter to what we know. They mess up our understanding of why.

Back to the Bird This wraps up our exercise on the six ways we see, except for one last thing: the bird. When we ended the exercise, I asked, ”Is the bird still on the ground or did it fly away?” While I have no idea where your bird ended up, I do know this: After going through the bird-dog drill with hundreds of people, I've seen a pretty consistent two-to-one split. Two-thirds of bird-dog partic.i.p.ants say the bird flew away-usually because it got scared by the dog-while one-third say the bird stayed on the ground-either because the exercise ended before the bird noticed the dog, or because the bird was bigger than the dog and would have been happy to eat that puppy for breakfast.

Wherever your bird ended up, the final point of the exercise is the same: Based solely on things we saw, we can begin to make rational arguments about why particular things happened in our world, and back up those arguments by pulling from the 6 W's. Whether we come away believing that birds fly away from dogs or not, we've justified and solidfied our understanding of the hows and whys of the world, simply by seeing the whos, whats, wheres, and whens.

Putting the Six Ways to Work When we see problems according to the 6 W's, we're taking advantage of the way our eyes and mind naturally view the world. By seeing a problem as six individual yet related components, we've got a problem-solving approach that is entirely intuitive (since it mirrors the way our eyes already see) and powerful (since it's usually a lot easier to address a handful of small challenges than one big one).

The Chocolate War All it usually takes to see a problem clearly is to consciously seek out the 6 W's. A couple years ago, I worked with the training and personal development manager at one of the world's largest online stores. Lila had been with the company since day one and had seen it grow from a shop of twenty people to well over a thousand, and as training manager, Lila knew every one of them. Ask her a who, what, where, when, or why about anybody, and she could answer. Over her five years with the company, Lila had become an irreplaceable business a.s.set, the one person who knew everyone, and her managers agreed that they'd bend over backward to keep her.

But one day Lila got a call from a headhunter with an offer that no amount of executive back bending could counter: chocolate. One of the nation's most highly regarded luxury chocolate brands was s.h.i.+fting into growth mode. All around the country, sales of high-end chocolate were up as Americans' tastes became more refined, and the company realized that if it was ever going to expand its small base of regional shops into a nationwide chain, the time was now. But in spite of the need for speed, the company's leaders made the decision that growth would not come at the cost of quality.

Which meant that everyone involved in opening the new stores-from the managers to the chocolatiers to the cas.h.i.+ers-would need quality-oriented and quality-centric training, and lots of it. The company needed a training manager with experience in rapidly growing organizations, which meant that the company needed someone like Lila. And Lila, tasting a real opportunity, realized that she was more ready for a change than she'd thought. She took the job.

When Lila met her new team, she was awed by their experience and dedication. Most had been with the company for the bulk of their careers and knew exactly how things worked, inside and out. This was good for Lila, because it meant she'd have the collected insight in the company available to her as she ramped up the new training engine. But it also turned out to be bad for Lila because it meant that her people had been looking at their same materials for so long that they could no longer see them.

When Lila asked for a sample of existing training materials, her team brought her hundreds of doc.u.ments in dozens of binders, each with cryptic names: LLT v. 12, CTFS&C 2005, and ISMT Lvl 2 (SM) (Leader-Lead Training, Chocolate Tasting for Staff and Customers, In-Store Management Training for s.h.i.+ft Mgrs). When she asked for an overview to orient herself within these unfamiliar terms, her team came back with another dozen doc.u.ments: calendars and schedules, org structures and job t.i.tles, training locations, lists of desired outcomes, and test result summaries.

Her team didn't ”get” what Lila was asking for, and Lila wasn't ”getting” what she wanted. For her, it was like looking under the hood and not seeing anything useful: There were too many pieces with too few visible connections to discern any patterns. There was no question that her team knew what they were talking about; they answered any query from Lila with speed and confidence. When Lila asked, ”Who attends Leader-Lead Training version 12?” they all answered in unison, ”All new hires who have completed Bean Basics but have not yet qualified on customer tastings management.”

It drove Lila crazy: Her people knew their training programs so well that they could n't remember what it was like to not know them. Since the curriculum had grown around them, her team couldn't see training as anything but a fully integrated piece-which was the last thing that Lila could discern. As an experienced trainer herself, Lila knew that the fix relied at least as much on her as on her team. They knew what was what but couldn't describe it; she didn't know what was what and couldn't see anything.

Lila had three choices: She could bear all the pain (attend the entire training series herself-a minimum eighteen-week commitment, normally spread out over five plus years); she could make her team bear all the pain (by telling them to go off as a group and not come back until they'd rewritten everything in a way that could be summarized in an hour); or they could all share the pain.

Lila chose the shared-pain option, and that's when she called me. She wanted to arrange a whiteboarding session to which everybody brought all their training materials, looked for connections with everybody else's materials, and kept at it until all the pieces gelled into visible alignment. Not being a fan of daylong ”brainstorming sessions,” Lila wondered if I had any ideas about how pictures might minimize the pain.

I suggested that she and her team lay everything out and then work through it piece by piece, trying to see the chocolate training process as it is reflected across the 6 W's.

1. Looking over all the materials in front of them, I suggested that they try to see the who and the what of the training system.

Who gets trained and who does the training?

What topics are taught and what lessons are presented?

2. Next, try to see how much and how many.

How many lessons are required; how much time do they take?

How many people can attend each lesson; how many instructors are needed?

3. Next, try to see the where.

Geographically, where do the lessons take place: in-store, training facilities, at home?

Conceptually, where do the lessons overlap in content, structure, or attendance?

4. Then the when.

When do the lessons take place?

In what sequence do they need to occur?

5. Then the how.

How does one lesson relate to another; how do they fit together?

How are the lessons taught: face-to-face, in a group, online?

How are the lessons applied; how do you know you're ready to move on?