
Male Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) displaying during breeding season. On the morning after I saw my double shadow, I happened to pass between two male red-winged blackbirds, perched in two trees, one on each side of the path. They were engaged in vigorous negotiations regarding breeding territory. In such negotiations, they emit a call used specifically for these transactions, one I hadn't noticed before. I stopped to find the birds that were doing it, and I was rewarded with a fairly close-up view of this very display. You can learn more about their behavior from a video by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, hosted at YouTube. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Making my way around the pond at dawn, this morning is a bit different from most. The pond is mirror smooth; the sky completely clear. Dawn turns into brilliant sunrise just before I pass a place where my shadow falls on a low bank to my West. I suddenly notice that I have not one shadow, but two. One is familiar, the kind you always see on a sunny day. But the second is strange — it's faint, and higher than the first.
Eventually I realize that the sun casts the first shadow. The sun's reflection in the pond's mirror casts the second one. Such a simple thing, but I've never noticed it before.
I wonder: what else in Life have I never noticed? What goes unnoticed can become seriously important at the least convenient times. Here are four questions that might make the unnoticed more noticeable.
- What is here that I don't notice?
- In the rush to get from wherever we are to where we're supposed to be next, noticing what's here right now often escapes us. We focus more on where we're headed than where we are.
- Take in your surroundings with all your senses. What's here right now?
- What do I think is here that isn't really here?
- Expectations can distort observations. We see things that aren't there. For example, it took me six months to notice that the postal service had removed a corner mailbox in my neighborhood.
- What assumptions are you making about your corner of the world? Have you tested them lately?
- What isn't here, whose absence I don't notice?
- When we When we focus only on what's here,
we can fail to notice what isn't herefocus only on what's here, we can fail to notice what isn't here. For example, in a regular meeting where people engage in annoying sidebar conversation, the absence of sidebars might indicate something important. - Noticing the absence of something requires imagining what can be, or remembering what has been, in spite of what is. Noticing what can be, but has never been, can lead to astounding innovations.
- What do I notice mistakenly in place of something that is actually here?
- Mistakes, misinterpretations, biases, and wishes can lead to noticing falsely one thing that isn't here in place of something else that actually is. When we experience fear and suspicion as a result of prejudice or superstition, we mistakenly notice what is not, instead of what is.
- Haste can cause errors like these. Bigotry can too. How many other sources can you find?
How many simple things don't we notice? Noticing my second shadow took a special situation. But if you think about it, almost every situation is special in some way. I'm beginning to believe that in every situation, there is much that I never noticed before. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Critical Thinking at Work:
Paths
- Most of us follow paths through our careers, or through life. We get nervous when we're off the path.
We feel better when we're doing what everyone else is doing. But is that sensible?
Difficult Decisions
- Some decisions are difficult because they trigger us emotionally. They involve conflicts of interest,
yielding to undesirable realities, or possibly pain and suffering for the deciders or for others. How
can we make these emotionally difficult decisions with greater clarity and better outcomes?
Learning
- What have you learned today? What has enriched you, changed your understanding of the world, or given
you a new view of history or the future? Learning something new every day is a worthy goal.
Performance Mismanagement Systems: I
- Some well-intentioned performance management programs do more harm than good, possibly because of mistaken
fundamental beliefs. Specifically: the fallacy of composition, the reification error, the myth of identifiable
contributions, and the myth of omniscient supervision.
Motivated Reasoning
- When we prefer a certain outcome of a decision process, we risk falling into a pattern of motivated
reasoning. That can cause us to gather data and construct arguments that erroneously lead to the
outcome we prefer, often outside our awareness. And it can happen even when the outcome we prefer is
known to threaten our safety and security.
See also Critical Thinking at Work and Workplace Politics for more related articles.
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And on July 20: Overt Verbal Abuse at Work
- Verbal abuse in the workplace involves using written or spoken language to disparage, to disadvantage, or to otherwise harm others. Perpetrators tend to favor tactics that they can subsequently deny having used to harm anyone. Available here and by RSS on July 20.
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