… and a framework for improving the way we observe
I was at the Heathrow airport in a queue waiting to board my next flight. In front of me, I saw a Korean couple with a beautiful girl less than a year old. It’s about 07:30 in the morning. The place looks crowded, but most people are settled waiting for the boarding announcement. In that moment, this child bursts out howling. It is a strange way of crying that I have never experienced before. Her voice is loud, pace steady but shallow like a sudden gust of wind finding its way into a tiny opening in a window. It makes the mother feel uncomfortable; she avoids eye contact with others as the child continues to cry. The father pats on the back of the child in the hope that she will stop making that embarrassing noise. But none of this helps the situation. The mother looks even more tensed now. I’m immediately reminded of my own days as a young parent. My first reaction when my child would cry was that ‘oh no! It’s not my child.’ I want to run away from the scene.
But slowly, I shift my attention to my own self, I observe my stiff shoulders. I feel tensed in my muscles; my body is shrunk, and my forehead muscles are firm. Slowly, I make an attempt to relax and observe my bodily reactions. My shoulders descend, my neck is relaxed, my heart is more attuned with my mind. I’m seeing a different reality now. I am seeing an old woman pacifying the child from behind, the mother is reciprocating to this old lady with a smile and another person cheering up the little girl from far. People come together and they become so kind and compassionate when a child cries, I said to myself. I look around and most people are unaffected looking at their phone screens. I see the father is putting together the passport and boarding passes and the family is moving towards the boarding gate. Work as usual. Where is the embarrassment?
In the risk and safety world, we talk about observing behaviours and populating observation cards. This little story highlights the need for understanding the relationship between the observer and the observed. In drawing cultural assessments, the first question to ask is, what is it that I am really seeing here? Reality is not totally a construct (social constructivism) but it is also not fully objective (naïve realism). That is why reality is best understood by viewing it from different perspectives and becoming aware of our own biases.
When I first studied culture as part of my PhD, I was taught that when you take notes during fieldwork each page of your diary should be dissected into two sections. On the left-hand side, you must write about your own state of mind during the observation (whether you were sad, angry, surprised, curious, attracted, aroused, hungry, thirsty etc.) when writing down an observation. On the right-hand side, you write down what you have observed.
As humans, our senses are exposed to so much information, but we tend to perceive what we are emotionally drawn towards. A surprise, an unusual situation and sometimes even an agenda to reinforce what we already know are all examples of how we record observations. While the unfamiliar nature of a surprise disrupts our life processes (breathing, heartbeat, activation of sweat glands, pulse rate, blood pressure) the reassurance that we can somehow process and name what we are seeing because the phenomenon seems familiar are all examples of observations.
When I watched the baby crying, I was disturbed by the memories of my own experiences as a parent. Like many parents, I was thrown in distress when my child would cry in a public place. As I watched the child, I was back to my own culture to make sense of the situation. Once I was emotionally imbalanced, my observation of the situation was nothing but a reflection of my own experiences from the past.
It is a common problem in risk and safety. You see someone not wearing a safety hat or a pair of boots and you lose control of your emotions. Thereafter, what follows is a judgment and a verdict. But that verdict, whether you call it an unsafe behaviour or an unsafe situation, is a reflection of your inner world. It has little to do with the outside world.
In Social Psychology of Risk*, the language that we use becomes the basis of all decision making. The words that we use to describe the world around us consists of three layers of language:
Workspace – the material world that we are observing;
Headspace – the psychological state of the observed and/or the observed;
Groupspace – the relationship between the observer, the one being observed and the social environment.
Image: Layers of risk in our language (Social Psychology of Risk)
This seemingly simple and straightforward way of observing also resonates with how the anthropologists and behavioural scientists record their field observations. By paying close attention to our own language during recording an observation we come to a very different and often more accurate meaning of reality. When we consciously shift our focus from objects to people in relationships, not only it improves the quality of our observations, but it also helps us to build trust with people whose behaviours we are observing.
Let us examine how to improve the quality of our observations using the iCue engagement board (image below). The board consists of four quadrants. The top two quadrants are reserved to record physical observations (Workspace). The bottom left quadrant is for psychological observations (Headspace) and the bottom right quadrant is for recording cultural observations (Groupspace).
As the mapping of language in the picture below reveals, we spot an unsafe act (in Workspace), lose control of our emotions (in Headspace) and we end up recording our own biases as the observation (in Groupspace).
Image: Mapping our language on the iCue board
By slowing down and taking a stock of our emotions, we may invite others to a conversation and arrive at a different meaning of our observation.
Image: A shift in behaviour by observing our language on the iCue board
This is one of the many intuitive methods used in Social Psychology of Risk to improve our decision making and observation skills. Join us for a session online or in-person to learn more about how we can improve our observations, conversations and decision making skills.
