THE ART OF SEEING

On Louis Botha Avenue last week I passed a man pushing his belongings along the pavement. I'd filed him before I finished looking. Then something made me look again. Sunglasses. A woollen balaclava, in the middle of the day. And the thing he was pushing wasn't a trolley or a cart. It was an old baby pram. No baby. Just stuff.

The second version of that man is interesting. The first one isn't. The only difference between them is about three seconds of continued attention.

Many of us don't see the world we live in. We recognise it. But then we stop looking.

If I say "tree," nothing arrives in your mind with bark on it. You get the concept, clean and generic and useless. If you stand in front of an actual tree and there's bark peeling away on one side, a branch growing crooked out of the trunk, maybe initials someone cut into it fifteen years ago. Perhaps there’s a plastic bag caught high in the branches where nobody can reach it. None of that is in the word. But it’s all in that particular tree.

The same closing-down happens with “restaurant,” “meeting,” “traffic,” “argument,” “sunset.” The brain checks the shape against everything it has already filed, finds a match, and stops. Psychologists call a version of this habituation: the mind filters out what it expects so it can spend its energy on what it doesn't.

As a survival system, this is superb. As a storytelling system it's a disaster, because stories don't live in categories. They live in particulars. And particulars only exist for whoever was still looking when they happened. Technique can arrange material, but it cannot produce material that your attention never collected.

On Sunday night I looked properly at our dining-room table for the first time all weekend. "Messy table after the weekend" is technically true, and it vanishes the moment you say it. What was actually there: a candle. A bottle of dry white Kiddush wine, about three-quarters gone. A half-finished bottle of sweet red grape juice beside it. A Stanley flask. A tub of peanut butter. Several empty glasses, milchik and fleishik muddled together. Now we're looking at this table, on this Sunday, in this house.

Another night, after the usual chaos of supper and fighting and bed, I sat down in the lounge. The category is the kids are finally asleep. What was actually there were two sounds and only two: my little boy snoring in his pram, and the fridge buzzing in the kitchen. Nothing happened. It only became audible because of what it had followed.

So the first discipline, if you want to start getting better at storytelling, is easy to say and hard to do. Refuse the label. Go back to the evidence. Not he was angry, but what did anger looked like on him? Not the meeting went well, but what happened in it. Not she's good with people, but what she did in the first ninety seconds that made the room settle.

And then there's a second trap, but it's more subtle.

There's a man who sits outside the coffee shop beneath my office. He's there most times I walk past. On the table is a coffee, cigarette, an ashtray already full by mid-morning. His feet are swollen over the sides of his shoes. Last week I noticed the cigarettes themselves for the first time: not Marlboro, not Camel, some brand I'd never seen. The box looked cheap.

By the time I got upstairs I had decided he was diabetic and smoked two packs a day.

I know neither of those things. I'd done the work of noticing and then thrown the result away. Swollen feet, full ashtray, unfamiliar brand, the odd regularity of the same chair: four real particulars, converted in about four seconds into a category with a diagnosis attached. And it arrived feeling like something I had observed rather than something I had invented.

That's the same failure as before, arriving later. Interpretation is another way of leaving reality early. You look properly, you find the specific thing, and then the mind hurries to tell you what it means so that it can stop holding it.

Take the following sentence: A business says, “engagement is bad.”

Almost nothing survives inside that sentence. Bad where? With whom? On which content? Compared with when? Are fewer people arriving, or are the same number arriving and fewer staying? Refusing that label is the entire first move of strategic work. And a surprising amount of the job is being willing to keep asking after everyone in the room has agreed on the summary.

Then the second trap arrives, right on cue. Someone says: our audience doesn't understand what we do. Maybe. But that isn't a finding. It's the first explanation somebody attached to the evidence. It’s now being carried around as though it were a fact. Most of the strategic mistakes I've watched happen started exactly there, with a plausible explanation promoted to the truth and months of work built on top of it.

Storytelling and strategy run on the same habit. Stay with what is actually there for longer than is comfortable, and only then start deciding what it means.

We've just started publishing the Storytelling Map, seven foundations of the craft, one a week. Perception is the first. Attention and observation are the first two capabilities inside it, and they're the only part of storytelling you can begin practising today without knowing anything else about it.

The exercise is small. Make three observations a day, and write them down.

They mustn’t be ideas or opinions. "The city is full of people down and out" is an opinion; you had it before you left the house. The man with the pram is an observation. One to three sentences, the thing as it was.

Two rules will make this work. Record particulars rather than categories: if what you've written could describe a hundred other evenings, you've written the label and not the thing. And don't interpret. No "this shows", no "it reminds me of", no small lesson at the end. I find that second rule almost impossible, which is rather the point.

What surprised me when I did it, is what the exercise doesn't produce. I expected it to turn up remarkable things. It doesn't do that. It makes ordinary things stop being invisible.

One afternoon I turned at a traffic light and saw a man in a waiting car staring straight down at his phone. The car behind him happened to be my friend, also looking down at theirs. They didn't see me drive past. Fifty metres on, a security guard outside a house, looking down at his phone. And at the four-way stop down the road, I saw someone else I know, talking into hers. I was in the middle of thinking about how extraordinary this was, everyone around me sealed inside a small screen, when I noticed I was dictating the observation into mine.

Three a day. You could start with whatever is on the table you'll eat at tonight.

The man outside the coffee shop was there again this morning. I still don't know what those cigarettes cost him, the status of his health, or why he's always in that chair. I've stopped being in a hurry to decide.

I don't only think observation is the first storytelling skill. I think in fact, it's the first act of respect. Looking properly at something is a way of saying that it’s worth attention, before I reduce it, explain it, or move on. Every great storyteller shares that habit. They don't arrive with the meaning already made. They stay with the thing long enough for something real to emerge.