15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with John V Willshire

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to John V Willshire about scanning our environment to make sense of things, specifically uncertainty. 

Bronwyn Williams: Hi, I’m Bronwyn Williams. This is my colleague Tumelo and we are here with our Flux Foreplay™ 15-Minute Conversations where we chat to people who have interesting ideas about the future and our place in it. And today our guest is John Willshire. 

And John, to start with, can you please tell us about the art of noticing things, the art of seeing things that are right in front of you, but really seeing them? Really seeing things. 

John V Willshire: So thank you so much. We notice things all the time and this is it. You would just be walking down streets or sitting in your office or just scanning the website for news or whatever and you’ll pick up things and so on. It’s only really when you start developing a habit for going, “Ha, I noticed a thing!” that suddenly you can start to unlock the power. 

So there’s the initial noticing and then there’s the thinking about what a thing is. So one of the tools we have for noticing things is something called an obliquoscope (below). So it’s essentially something I started off using on a futures course called Innovation in Future Thinking in Barcelona. And essentially it was just a way of taking some of the questions my brilliant friend Natalie Kane from the V&A brought to the course. And I just wanted to show students how to use a laser cutter. So I took some of Natalie’s questions and put them on a frame like this and said, “So just point this at things and say, ‘What is this? Where’s it come from? Why does it exist? Who made it? What else does it do?’” And suddenly just… and unlocking that power or sort of like making people focus on a thing but deepen their relationship with it. 

You get this, you unlock people in a way. They suddenly go, “Ha, I might not know but I bet I could find out. I don’t know who made it or I don’t know where the material’s from or I don’t know how many there are or I don’t know if it’s perceived as a good thing or a bad thing.” But suddenly the questions naturally come to people it seems. So just with the noticing is centred on, “We’re all human. We’re all brilliant and we can all do this naturally.” It’s just kind of what’s the simplest little step you can use to unlock that in people. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: You mentioned questions. I just wanted to ask you what kind of questions are you looking for? I’m going to call it a thingamajig. Will you call it an oblique? 

John V Willshire: I call it an obliquiscope. After the economist John Kay’s book, Obliquity. And so the point of the book, Obliquity, is that the best way to achieve a thing is often not going directly at it but going at it obliquely. So when I call this an obliquiscope, I sometimes tell people, “Okay, it helps you not to look at the thing you’re looking at.” It sounds strange but suddenly you go, “I am not just appraising it for its appearance and its surface and its so on. I’m beginning to contemplate other things around it.” 

So the questions on this version are at the top, it says, “What is this?” And it says, “What is it for? How do they get here? Who uses it? What else does it do? When is it used? Who made it? What is it made of? And why does it exist?” And some questions, like, sort of,like, “What is it for and why does it exist?” Sometimes they’re the same question and sometimes they’re very very different questions. Or even if you’re pointing at the same thing it can be the same question but suddenly it separates into very separate things indeed. So that’s on the thing itself. What we made recently…, so I was at a conference called Future Days so we used these as part of the city scanning exercise and we took, as an addition, we put on the back these four layers that you could look at which I’ll read them out because it won’t come up very well. But it’s based on something called Richard Buchanan’s Four Orders of Design. So it talks about… so look at the appearance of things. So the colour, the brand, the shape, all the things that sort of appears to be visible to the eye. And then think about the materials that they consist of. He goes, “So this is not a naturally occurring thing most of the time when you’re using this. So this has been made of something. So what’s it made of?” And then it’s, “What interactions does it create?” So suddenly you look at an object but you say, “Okay so how are people using it or not using it? And how are they working with, not just between themselves and a thing, but between each other as well?” And then the last question is, think about the systems that support this. 

So suddenly you start asking people to peel away the layers of reality and go, “Okay so what’s really going on here?” And it’s really an abductive thinking tool. So you might not know the answers to these questions but I bet you can probably guess. You can guess where to look. You can guess how to kind of point your research and go, “Huh, I don’t know what sort of system supports this mobile network and so on or how most people are paying for this over here.” But that becomes a good question that I can say, “Needs to find this out.” 

Tumelo Mojapelo: So how does this approach help people thrive in the face of uncertainty? 

John V Willshire: That’s a good question. I think what it does is, and I’ve been thinking about this for a talk that I did last week. So Bruno Latour gave a talk called a “cautious Prometheus” and in that referred to some other work that “thing” from the original German or old English etymology is a gathering. So when we use the word “thing” I like to think of it as, like, we’re not being imprecise. We’re just being precise about how complex it is. We’re going, “A thing is happening.” And I don’t just mean, “Oh we’ve got a wildlife group on the estate.” You go, “Okay so a thing by a wildlife group on our little estate where we live is about everyone’s gardens and all of our legislation has been passed and how the council haven’t adopted the roads and how nature works in amongst the gardens and the green spaces and so on.” You go, “It’s lots of different factors that can posit this thing.” 

So in the face of uncertainty to pick up your question, if you can’t see a thing it’s very hard to change a thing. So using the obliquoscope to start peeling apart those layers allows people to really visualise what a thing is and once you can see a thing and it doesn’t take like experts or professional designers, whatever else it happens to be, it’s kind of like once you reveal it to most people it can point to parts of it and go, “Now that I know that this is doing this why don’t we change that?” It becomes more obvious once you see a thing for what it really is to go, “All right I have uncertainty about what’s coming next but now that I can see the true form of it I’ve got some ideas about how we might want to affect change.” 

TumeIo Mojapelo:  Like that…

Bronwyn Williams: There’s some type of blind spot… is right in front of you, you just have to look for it. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Look at it. I like how… 

John V Willshire: Amazing just having that little, just a little window, just suddenly it just takes you into looking at the kind of the webcam on top of my monitor or whatever else or the car that’s out there which is an electric car next to a petrol car and suddenly it just focuses me in an environment because cities, towns, villages, countryside, seaside, whatever it happens to be are all full of lots and lots of different things. 

Humans have had such an effect detrimental on the world in so many different ways but also positively there’s so much going on any place you happen to be. So this just allows you to start taking those things around you one at a time and go “oh well let’s just concentrate on this for a minute or two.” 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I like how you frame the idea how you can reframe uncertainty by looking in that little frame because it doesn’t come across as uncertainty. It could actually be something else beyond uncertainty. 

Can I just ask you a question? How do you then, if you’re a leader, hone the skill of zoning in so you might not have the little contraption but like how do you look up and actually just say I’m going to focus on maybe a sign, a building, a physical feature, like infrastructure, structure or even just think about the system like how the road works whatever it is right and like hone the skill of maybe like blocking out the white noise and actually focusing on something and asking the right questions to be able to not only frame uncertainty but to also be able to deal with whatever answers come from it. 

John V Willshire: So I think that’s another good question and I like that when you use the word leader within that I like to do this exercise with other people and so any leader who is doing this you could say oh if you take that a window or just go and look in your environment and find one particular thing if you do that on your own it’s basically you and your perspective. If you are standing next to three, four, five of your team or people from different parts of a business and you go let’s just go and look at the factory floor, the shop where our thing is sold, the kind of like the high street nearest someone’s house. Let’s just go and look what we see and see what’s relevant for our world. 

In listening to the rest of your team answer that question as well and seeing what they focus on you will get a different sense of the things that they are saying and the connections that they make based on their experience and the questions that they might have about them and so then in this space between all of you you go emerges okay so what’s really interesting here is not just my opinion the thing I’m focusing on as a leader but this common sense of a collective way of seeing the world so that we can go actually when we talk to each other and we know different parts of the business and we want to achieve different things we know there’s complexes complexities within that and uncertainty out there but once we start talking to each other about the things that we’re seeing you find maybe by to Bronwyn’s point they can let you suddenly go to the blind spot and like okay we never mentioned this we never mentioned this part of the customer service journey or we never mentioned this part of the material sourcing and yet it’s everywhere we’re all spotting it in different things day by day week by week in different things but only by saying to each other what we’re seeing around the place does it come to the surface.

Tumelo Mojapdelo: And then do you have any case studies that you can share where you’ve done this exercise of like a leadership or like leadership team or leaders with the team where you’ve really been amazed or inspired by the results that came out of it because for someone when we like when we share these concepts and these constructs or approaches or models of thinking it seems like very simplistic approach very simple way of approaching let’s say a problem or a situation right and I think but like how can something so simple and so obvious be so helpful and so insightful and transformative as well? So like if you have any case studies or like an instant maybe in the work that you’ve already done like now you just said you’ve shamed that little tool of your time so sorry for got the name again, slipped my mind…

John V Willshire: It’s very hard to say I will give you that it’s calling it an oblique microscope which let’s be honest is not a word makes it really hard to say for everybody including me …

But I think we’ll add it in the notes so people know actually what it’s called because I think it’s good to know that and get that into their vocab because I think it’s a great tool of framing of how you look up and you scan the world and frame the world. So like do you have any case studies where you can share where you’ve seen great things come out of this exercise activity?

John V Willshire: So I can tell you one of my favourite things and it’s actually it’s related to the course that we came up with it on primarily but the same is true in other settings with clients but I like the way this story unfolds essentially. So on the course one year we had students from all over the world come but I remember a conversation between a Danish designer and a designer from Brazil and the conversation was essentially Danish designers said oh we’ll make people connect with wi-fi to this because we’re imagining different futures for different things and we can do this they connect with wi-fi they can use their phones and all the data and so on and so forth, and the designers from the Brazil went let me tell you about where I’m from in Manaus where we’re lucky if we have 2g signal and none of this works so we can’t sort of let design from that perspective down and then miss lots of people what can we do from that perspective up? 

And so then they would go around the streets looking for low tech solutions so because we do the course in Barcelona as well this the street is filled with so many different examples but their emphasis became on sort of like where can we spot examples of people using really low tech solutions to do things so that’s one example from course.

And then the two other examples of course which are almost just like things that people have said after doing this exercise um there’s one student from again from Brazil came back in after a lot of day of city scanning he was like “I can’t stop seeing like this” and this is sort of like so this is almost like the point to this is it’s it’s a bit like do you remember the Disney movie Dumbo it’s a bit like Dumbo’s feather right so Dumbo only thinks he can fly because he’s got the feather and then he loses the feather goes “…well can’t fly now…” and a little mouse good like this it’s not the feather right if you, if you’re going around and seeing things this is a feather right this is like you don’t stop being able to see if you don’t have the thing.

And then the final quote from the the course um was a student last year, year before he just turned around so I was looking at him.. “do you know what I’m really enjoying my new eyes…” 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Oh that’s nice…

John V Willshire: I know it was so lovely… 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much for sharing it I think I love that last quote about I really enjoy using my new eyes because I mean we always have our minds eye our real eyes but we don’t actually see things in a new light and I think this approach helps people see things they’ve always seen every day in their everyday lives in a new light and see that they’ve been missing these opportunities around them especially the example about the low-tech they’ve been missing these examples because they have not been looking at a certain level or looking with the specific lens at solving the problem or whatever this not even a problem but just searching for solutions actually because sometimes it’s obviously looking for a solution to a problem but just finding a better way of doing something or changing a system or making it better.

John V Willshire: Exactly this! And even if, even if all you achieve with this is like you reveal the the world more in a way that really tells how it is it shows a thing for what it actually is rather than the kind of the surface of something that you ignore, even if you don’t have a solution for it, even if it’s just acknowledging some of the stuff that’s going on the world that’s such a powerful start.

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much John for your time. For those who are watching our 15 Minute Foreplay™  Conversations, please continue to subscribe, share, join us for other ones – there’s other conversations that we’ve recorded and we’ll see you next time. Bye.

By Flux Trends 

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