Essentialism (XIII): Essence Of The Essentialist: Explore: Look

 "Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"  - T.S. Eliot

"In every set of facts, something essential is hidden".

Journalism, starts McKewon quoting an interview of journalist Nora Ephron, consists in understanding a very specific set of things.  There are the standard things that is taught to any aspiring journalist (or Quality Investigator, for that matter):  Who, What, When Where, How, even Why.  But there is also the real issue:  What is the point of the thing being reported on and why does it matter?

Like a journalist, says McKeown, Essentialists look for that essential thing.  It means exploring the information and pieces and parts.  It means exploring their relationships and their connections - and making them explicit in their relationship, not just vague.   It mean "...constructing the whole from the sum of its parts and understanding how these different pieces come together to matter to anyone.  The best journalists do not simply relay information. Their value is in discovering what really matters to people."

Non-essentialists, posits McKeown, suffer from a lack of focus, a day by day overwhelming from information and requests that make it difficult to understand what matters and what does not.  The Non-essentialist can end up "missing the point" to something in any circumstance (work or home) and not realize the error until it was too late.

How do we begin to look for what is important, the "why"?

1) Look for the big picture

In 1972, an Eastern Airlines crash which killed 100 passenger.  The fault, investigators discovered, was not the mechanical condition of the aircraft (perfect working order), but rather that during preparation for landing the indicator light for nose gear had not lit up - although the gear was locked in place.  Focused solely on this issue, the pilots failed to notice that the auto-pilot had been deactivated - until it was too late.

Likewise, suggests McKeown, being the "journalist" of our life - look for the why and why it matters, will help us stop focusing on the minor details and being to see the bigger picture around us.  We should, he suggests, look for the "lead" like any good journalist does - the who, what where, why, when and how- but also the "why it matters".

2)  Filter for the fascinating

None of us can ever follow up and explore every single piece of information that we encounter in our lives.  Instead, we have to become discerning, to "...understand what is essential to explore requires us to be disciplined in how we scan and filter all the competing and conflicting facts, options, and opinions constantly vying for our attention.  He uses a quote from Thomas Friedman that the best journalists listen for what others do not hear the things that are not being said.

Likewise, Essentialists are powerful observers and listeners.  Knowing that - from the rule of trade-offs, that everything is a trade off and we can do anything but not everything - they focus their attention on what is not being explicitly stated:  they read between the lines.

Non-essentialists also listen - but they listen only while preparing to respond. They distracted by the noise of the conversation. They pay too much attention the detail that are of no consequence.  They too often hear the loudest voice but get precisely the wrong message: McKeown quotes C.S. Lewis in that they are people running around with fire extinguishers in times of flood.

They miss the lead.

So how does the Essentialist not miss the lead?

A)  Keep a Journal - To act like a journalist of our lives, he suggests keep a journal.  Because we as humans are terribly forgetful about what happened earlier this week, let alone last year.  He uses quote I had never heard before but it is completely accurate: "The faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory."

How often?  How much?  He does not have a periodic suggestion, other than "regularly".  And his suggestion for how much is simply write less than you feel like writing until the habit is established.

His other recommendation is every 90 days or so, spend an hour or two to re-read all of your journal entries - not focus on the details, but to focus on the main themes, on the things that are said and the things that are not said.  Look for the lead - we cannot always see small changes daily, but over time trends become visible.

B) Get out in the Field - To truly solve a problem, it is important to see what problem actually needs to be solved.  And that can sometimes only be done by actually making a visit or tour of things related to the problem to truly understand what the problem is - because without understanding the actual problem, we cannot understand the actual solution.

(Quality and Lean practitioners will know this as Gemba walks.  The word "Gemba" means "the actual place" in Japanese; the concept is to go to where the work is done to understand the work or process and its challenges).

C) Keep your eyes peeled for abnormal or unusual details - McKeown quotes another journalist, Mariam Semaan, who suggests that finding the lead and spotting the essential information are learnable skills.  What you need is knowledge:  understanding of the topic, its context, the bigger picture, and its relationship to different field: "'My goal', she said, 'was to understand the 'spiderweb' of the story because that is what allowed me to spot any 'abnormal' or 'unusual' details or behavior that didn't quite fit into the natural course of the story.'"

D) Clarify the Question:  We are human.  We can tend to avoid the hard questions.  We can tend to avoid them by giving vague answers rather than the process of finding the facts and information needed to give a thoughtful, cogent answer.  Yet, says McKeown, that vague answer only sends us down the path of further vagueness and misinformation.  One way to get out of that cycle is to clarify the question.

This can be a multi-stage process.  We can ask a question, then talk more, then reframe and re-ask the question based on the discussion and additional data - but always, always, we should be driving to the point of "What is the actual question we are trying to answer?"  Only when we have and ask the right question can start to get the right answers.

Application:

I have never been as good as looking at the big picture as I should have been.  Part of that is I often apply my own "version" of the big picture instead of the actual big picture - "Dealing with the facts as you find them, not the facts as you wish them to be (I really like to think I said this, but I probably inherited it from somewhere else).  It is only later in life that I have stated to actually learn to look at the larger picture and pick out the things that are unusual or unexpected.

Of his four suggestions, by far the one I have developed best is that of the journal.  I have keep a journal - not daily all the time, but very regularly all of the time and daily most of the time - since 1989.  What I not so good at is going back to look for themes and trends (oddly enough, I quite dislike going back and reading what I have written. I am my own worst critic).

The other three items - Getting out in the field, Keeping my eyes peeled for abnormal or unusual details, and Clarifying the Question - are all things that I use rather daily in my work life (they really all are Quality and Lean concepts).  I do not know necessarily know how to get out in the fields I need to in my personal life but there must be a way.  Keeping my eyes peeled is really a practice that I work in my sword training (always looking for that intent to draw).  And if nothing else for many of the years of this blog, I have been effectively (and terribly slowly, apparently) clarifying the questions of my life.

Am I seeing the big picture?  Probably still no, although there are moments that I see faint outlines.