In This Issue: October 11, 2007

• The Art of Being a Spectator. Are you an "innie" or an "outie"?
  
• The Market Place The 5.75 Questions You've Been Avoiding. Making it easy to be a spectator with a sale on our screensaver.
  
• Michael's Speaking In the coming months I'm running public workshops in Baltimore, Toronto, Prague and Mumbai.
  

Warm wishes,

Michael Bungay Stanier
Principal, Box of Crayons

PS - Know someone who likes being a spectator? Please forward Outside the Lines to anyone you think might be interested.

The Art of Being a Spectator

Failing Science

Just how good a spectator are you?

I failed my first piece of formal observation.  My younger brother had been given a microscope kit for his birthday one year, and in my older brother sort of way, I took control and insisted on telling him how he'd first use it.  We set up the microscope, got two slides out and then looked around for something to observe.

Most people would have taken the obvious route - a blade of grass or a drop of water.  But not me.  I was determined to do something different, and decreed we would look at a drop of Super Glue.  Ignoring my brother's feeble protests, I squeezed glue between the only two slides in the kit...and in so doing managed nothing more that to stick them together permanently and signal the end of my brother's budding scientific career.

But since that unpromising start, I've found that I've become something of a professional observer... and not just any observer, an "outie" observer.

Are you an innie or an outie?

In the world of professional watchers - psychologists and anthropologists - there are two positions from which you can can view events. 

The first is an "innie", the emic position. This is when you throw yourself into the fray and observe while experiencing. You are part of the tribe, you observe the tribe and you judge using the standards of the tribe.  It's self-contained, relative and subjective.  The wisdom you find here is 'in the bones', deep not wide.

The second type is the "outie", the etic position, watching from the outside and applying universal criteria to what you see.  It's objective, absolute and universal. The wisdom here is "in the head", wide but not necessarily deep. 

Both of these positions feel like they give access to truth.  But neither gives access to the whole truth.

What do you think is the truth?

I know my preference is to be an outie.  In a crowd, I'll step to the edge and watch.  In the work I do I'm often the facilitator, an observer and influencer of the organization or a team.  Even in the sport I play - soccer - I play from the back and spend a good deal of time shouting at my teammates to do things while I'll watch what's going on.

In writing this article, I've become more conscious that I take on the role of outie observer because it gives me a sense of power and control - and ultimately, safety.

If I'm watching, analyzing, judging - then that puts me outside the system (so I can't be observed or judged).

And from the position of outie observer, I'm also removed from the sujective experience of the thing itself and have access to the objective truth of what's going on.

Of course, I'm kidding myself

For one thing, as an observer you're never really outside the system. The "observer effect" is well documented in science, the insight that as a viewer you are part of the system - and influencing the system. If you are a facilitator, you're part of the system.  If you're part of the crowd, you're part of the party.  If you're organizing a soccer team from the back line, you're part of the match.

Secondly, it's easy enough to think that as an outie, you're viewing things in an objective way. But everything I observe is through the mishmash of my own biases, models, hypotheses and judgments. (If you are an "innie" I suspect you're well aware of your biases and judgments - you just think they they are universal and shared by all).

And finally, I also start to realize how the viewpoints of an innie - and my wife is a fine example of an innie - can be deeply irritating to me at times, and how willing I am to dismiss them or at least devalue them as limited, colored, or overly emotional (as opposed to the innie view of an outie which my wife may see as being clinical, over-intellectualized and removed from reality).

Two ways to counteract the bias

1. NLP's Three Perceptual Positions

Neuro-Linguistic Programming school of thought says that you can only know the truth of any situation by looking at it from three different perspectives.

Be in it. What do you feel, see, hear and experience? What's going on for you?

Be in the other person's shoes.  What does the other person in the dynamic experience? What are they seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling?

Be an onlooker.  If you were observing the interaction as a disinterested observer, what would you see and hear?  What might you be thinking and feeling?

2. Byron Katie's "The Work"

"The Work" is dedicated to helping people see the reality of their situation. Byron's belief is that people's thoughts about how things should be, get in the way of them seeing (and accepting) how things are.

Her process is four deceptively simple questions, the first two are particularly relevant here. 

Smart folks thinking out loud about the art of being a spectator

"The inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.”
-Franz Kafka, Czech writer

"One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind."
-Alphonse Bertillon, French criminologist

"Life is not a spectator sport."
-Anonymous

"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."
-Oscar Wilde, Irish writer

 

The Market Place: The 5.75 Questions You've Been Avoiding

 

Got It Going On: Michael's Speaking Gigs