#61: I See Something…

… you don’t see.

I loved this game when I was a kid. As a father I played it again. Unexpectedly, the game is still on once you manage people in an organisation.

Life is all about expectation management. Your own. Your partner’s. Your manager’s. Your team’s. Trying to meet even some of them is so damn hard. Why not start with trying to see the world differently?

It turns out that when two people look at the same, they don’t necessarily see the same.

Someone purely sees what needs to get done, whereas someone else also sees why it is being done.

Take someone who performs sales data analysis and sees a purely quantitative way of explaining the past. Someone else looks at the same and sees an opportunity to make better decisions in the future on the basis of historical customer behaviour patterns.

Then again someone asks for a detailed step-by-step instruction with an objective not to «waste any time», while someone else sees an opportunity to explore.

This isn’t about right or wrong. It is impossible to argue with someone about the shape, size and colour of something the other person doesn’t see.

All of this isn’t limited to a business environment. It applies to all aspects of life. One of the most powerful accounts of seeing more than what meets the eye is the talk of Giles Duley at the Do Lectures in Wales. His powerful words say it all.

«When I took this photograph, I did not take the photograph of a refugee. I did not take the photograph of a disabled woman. I was photographing love. I was photographing a couple who are more in love with each other than anybody I have ever met in my life. And this is a photograph of love.»

The way we see the world helps define how we see ourselves.

«And that is when I realized I am not a war photographer. I document love.»