Evaluation as a Habit
On a recent trip to Africa to participate in some relief work and visit my parents, I had the opportunity to go on a safari. There were five of us in the jeep and each of us was assigned the task of “spotter”. As a spotter, our job was to point out animals to our guide and the group. Usually our guide had already seen the animal, but every once in awhile one of the members of the group found the animal before him.
A technique that was helpful in spotting animals was to have soft eyes. This is similar to star gazing. When you look directly at the star, it can often appear to diminish in brightness. However, if you look just next to the star and view the star indirectly, it appears to increase in brightness. Having soft eyes allows you to see forms and colors and look for irregularities in the landscape. It connects cognitively as these irregularities can also be logical irregularities. At one point in the trip we were climbing up a hill and it looked like there was a huge boulder in the middle of the field at the top of the hill. But that wouldn’t make a lot of sense for a huge boulder to be by itself with no other boulders around. As we drove closer, we found that it wasn’t a boulder at all, it was a huge bull elephant.
Soft eyes can make a huge difference in the way we lead. Have you ever walked into a meeting and had a sense that something else was happening? You quickly try to read the body language and voice inflections trying to figure out what you missed. Your soft eyes have recognized cognitive and/or logical irregularities. This recognition is known as situational awareness.
Not everyone has a high degree of situational awareness. Improving your situational awareness means that you need to increase your level of evaluation. On safari, the terrain, the animals, the patterns were unfamiliar. It was imperative that our group maintain a consistent focus and evaluation of what we were seeing and experiencing. A difficulty arises in business environments as often times the familiar can dull an evaluative mindset.
Three key questions to help kickstart a dulled awareness are:
Context
Ask, “ What is happening right now?”
Circumstance
Reflect on, “What has happened before?”
Consequence
Process through, “What is going to happen?”
Similar to that jr high challenge of placing a pencil two feet away from your face and slowly moving the pencil toward your nose. What happens? If you are focusing your eyes on the tip of the pencil, you become cross eyed. Right? But as you move the pencil back out you see the big picture again. Jim Collins calls this process “zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in and focus on what is happening at the moment, then zoom out and reflect on what has happened before and what might happen in the future.
On the last day of our safari, we were driving in our open top jeep and our soft eyes helped us come face to face with a lioness.
She was three or four feet away from the jeep and slowly began circling our vehicle. My awareness became very heightened. My focus was on the lioness, watching her movements; our guide, looking for signs of stress or concern; the others in the jeep, wondering if I could use them as a shield if she jumped into the vehicle (sorry mom). While that was happening, I also had to zoom out and recall that our guide said as long as we didn’t get out of or change the silhouette of the vehicle we were safe.
Improving your situational awareness is not only going to keep your people safe, it is going to create a culture of consistent refinement and progression. It is an evaluative habit that will heighten your attention to detail and big picture perspective.