Perhaps you have been a party to the following conversation:
Person A: Remember in <substitute movie> when <subtle event happened>?
Person B: I watched that movie just last night and I didn’t notice.
If you are not the creative type, then allow me to substitute a fun example for you:
Person A: Remember in Toy Story when Mr. Potato head kisses his butt with his own lips, to mock the slinky dog?1
Person B: I watched that movie just last night and I didn’t notice.
Now, if you don’t have children, and don’t spend a lot of time around children, you’ll have to take my word for it on this one. Every other conversation you have with a child is like this.
This takes some time to sink in if you haven’t lived it. I’ve chosen to buy you a little time with a filler paragraph bereft of any useful information or subtle transition. Parents especially will appreciate this break, I hope. I’d also like to take this time to dispel any confusion regarding my choice of example. The fact that I used a kids movie2 is not relevant to the point.
Bill Watterson really nailed this concept in so many of his strips. Unfortunately, there is no legitimate Calvin and Hobbes archive for me to link to. Roger Ebert also expressed it with great clarity in his original review of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
“Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and very little escapes their notice.”3
I recently had an experience with my children that illustrates the point perfectly. We were playing Plants vs. Zombies together4. They need a little help planting enough sunflowers and defending in the early part of each mission, so I get them going and then they take over. We’ve unlocked all the plants, so they get to choose from the full arsenal at the start of each mission. It’s ok if you don’t follow.
Their favorite plant is what we call “The Chomper.” This presents a problem as it is a sub-optimal purchase and offends me as both a gamer and a game developer. I try to support my children’s decisions though, even the suspect ones. The way it works is it “eats” the first zombie that approaches it. While it is chewing on the zombie (which takes a minute or so), an arm sticks out the side of the chomper’s mouth and it is vulnerable to attack.5
Almost all of the zombies are the same size, except for two. One is a giant that the chomper cannot eat and the other is a mini guy that the chomper can eat. In one of our games, a chomper ate a mini guy. This is such an unlikely occurrence that it has only happened to us once.6
So there’s all this stuff flying around the screen, and in the middle of the action a chomper eats a mini zombie and right away, my daughter asks me why the arm sticking out of the chomper was a normal-sized arm, when the chomper had only eaten a mini zombie. Recall that the entire point of relating the story is that this sort of thing is not exceptional for a child. This sort of thing happens all the time.
There’s something powerful here that feels familiar when you think about it. I’m sure people in many fields have contemplated the issue, but of course I have the most personal experience in my own field.
Programmers struggle at times to grasp subtle details, even those right before their eyes.
This can manifest itself in so many ways. The nuance of a word choice in a requirement can be lost during development. A programmer can stare at a screen, knowing something is wrong (and where), but not being able to put their finger on it until someone leans over their shoulder to help. Consider just a few things a software organization might do to mitigate these issues:
- Pair programming7
- Putting “extra eyes” on a problem when progress slows.
- Mixing young energy with veteran leadership/talent.
The loss of an eye for detail could be a result of any number of things. It might be as simple as the same numbing effect that results from proofreading your own work8. Maybe children have an eye for detail because everything is new to them.
There is a company named Specialist People Foundation9 that deals extensively with issues in this area. They employ people with Autism and similar disorders and leverage the different nature of their employees’ perceptions to tackle a variety of problems. I like a lot of things about that organization, but I think the most impressive is how effectively they created a strength from something that is perceived as a weakness:
“Our consultants have a passion for detail that is second to none, and bring unique competencies to tasks that most company employees are less motivated to perform, and therefore more prone to errors. The unique characteristics of autism and similar challenges mean that our consultants actually enjoy tasks that most employees find boring, repetitive or difficult due to the level of detail and concentration required.”
You are overlooking any number of details (at this moment even), and your ability to capture them is probably declining, not growing. Since you only get so many chances to consume something before you’ve totally lost the eye for detail, you want to bring as much energy as possible to each attempt. I’m not aware of any better way to approach things, unfortunately.
Of course, what you decide to do with those details after you notice them is an entirely different discussion. Clearly though, you can’t make meaningful decisions about things you’re not aware of.
- If you doubt me, start watching at 7:25. It is also listed in the parental guide for the movie at IMDB. [↩]
- Toy Story is not a kids movie. If you agreed with that classification then watch it again. [↩]
- You can go read the rest if you want. It is not very long. [↩]
- If you are not into steam for some reason, here is an Amazon Link. [↩]
- No, really, this is a good game for kids. I think. [↩]
- It turns out that you can easily reproduce this in the puzzle levels where you control zombies against plants setup by the computer. [↩]
- This is not an endorsement of pair programming. [↩]
- Note the built-in excuse here for any proofreading errors. [↩]
- I linked to their United States operation for my readers, the real deal is Specialisterne based in Denmark [↩]
Sometimes being able to notice every little detail is a curse. I see typos, misspellings, glitches in the synchronization between audio and video (and even reversed stereo imaging). It is useful, though, when programming and when editing articles.
;ted
p.s. You have a typo in the footnote #9: “read deal” should be “real deal”. And that’s just one error (“sun flower” is another — should be one word).
Thanks Ted, I appreciate the extra eyes. I made those corrections.
heh, my 4yo prefers chompers too. interesting entry, as was the tiger woods one. subscribed.
How about this, does it annoy you (forgive me
)
I think there is the trade-off between improved focus (not being distracted by all kinds of details) and keen observational skills. I know an adult friend with ADD, and she has very sharp eye for all kinds of details I overlook; but then again she gets much more easily distracted. So while it can be suggested that the loss of this sharpness may come with age, it could also be that it is price one pays for better executive skills, better ability to focus and improve grasp of the big picture.
This could also be then related to improved awareness that mediations techniques offer: when “not focusing on anything”, one can observe incredible number of things that otherwise would be lost, just because there is no focus that would block such “distractions”.
This would be sort of analogous with the observations that one of most important things in improving memory and recalling is ability to forget — although there is no hard limit to memory, there certainly is cost for maintaining large amounts of information, so priorization (up to an including basically forgetting or at least highly archiving “lesser” things) helps in making sure one can consciously remember the most important things.
I think this is part of what makes engineers efficient; one of the critical skills we develop as we mature is the ability to immediately slough off the unimportant details and create a coherent mental model of the core of the problem, which makes them tractable. The key is being able to quickly identify which details are important and which ones are pure noise. Developing an incorrect or slightly skewed mental model means that you’re solving the wrong problem, and now you have two problems.
We’ve all been in meeting where that one borderline autistic co-worker gets completely wrapped around the axle on some insignificant detail, and keeps the rest of the group from progressing to the key parts of the problem at hand. It’s a blessing when they’ve identified an important detail that everyone else has missed, and a curse when it turns out to be actually irrelevant.
I think we are looking at the problem the wrong way. It is not that the children “focus on detail” (which is almost an oxymoron), but that their definition of “detail” is different from yours. They focus in what’s important, like everybody else, but what is important for a child is different from what is important to an adult.
For example, they focus in the fact that Mr potato kisses his butt. Of course they do! That’s one of the most interesting parts of the movie! (for them). But if you ask them about some important – for you – parts of the film, you might find out they don’t remember them. Or if you pick any part of the movie at random and ask them about it, you will find that they p¡most likely didn’t notice it, as everybody else.
Same with the chomper. For a child, the fact that the chomper eats the zombie is the most important part of it. The fact that the chomper itself is a sub optimal choice is irrelevant. So they notice when the hand isn’t the right size (remember, the chomper eating the zombie is what they care about), but they most likely won’t notice if the chomper starts not being vulnerable to attack, as that is a detail for them. On the other hand, you are very likely to notice if the chomper starts not being vulnerable to attack (because for you, what is important is the effectiveness of the chomper, not the fact that it “eats” zombies). For the same reason, you are very unlikely to notice the arm being different size, because that is a detail for you.
I think this happens at all levels. Nobody is really “focusing in the details”, but everyone has a different definition of what is “Important” and what is “a detail”. If I ask to name a company with attention to detail, many people here would mention apple. And yet, apple is one of the companies with more laser focus in what is important that exists.
Again, the problem lies in the definition of “important”. For many people, as long as the computer works, how it looks is a detail. For Apple, how it looks is a very important part of it, and they might sacrifice other “details” to make it so. (like for example in the cube: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube ). For Apple, how the iphone 4 looked was a very important factor, if the antenna needed to make it look great wasn’t that good, then that was a detail.
You need to put attention to what’s important. And sacrifice the details needed to make what is important work well. The biggest problem is, knowing what’s important and what’s not. And what is important for you , might not be important for me, or for a children. You need to know what is important for the majority of your customers, and that is hard.
If you think about it, Microsoft owns much of its success to IBM looking as software as a “detail”, and focusing in hardware. Google also owns to yahoo and others thinking search was a “detail”, and that portals are what people wanted. (Yahoo even sub contracted google and put a link to them in the search results! Because search didn’t matter).
The other day, I was lamenting the sad state of the visual design of a project to a coworker. He was the head of QA, and said “what do you mean, what’s wrong with it?” So I opened a random page and started down my massive list of things that were 1px off here or there, or the baseline of some text didn’t line up with something on the other side of the page, or where the edge of a drop shadow in an image was cut short by a sliver.
I could have done it all day.
And that’s the problem with this kind of attention: none of that stuff bothered anybody else, but it drove me nuts, and it made me mad to think of how much work it would take to fix it and that it would probably always be that way. But it doesn’t really matter. Too much attention to detail gets in the way of just getting things done.
Thanks for the comments everyone. A couple of you have made some insightful points about how “attention to detail” can be a double edged sword.
In my experience, you don’t get to decide to ignore a detail as “insignificant” until you notice it in the first place. I chose my examples for novelty, not value, but I think the point still holds.
Noticing details, of any nature, is a separate event from deciding what to do with them. I was writing more to the former, at least I meant to
This is a very important point to make.
I do QA for a living. It is my job to point out every problem that I see, no matter how big or small. It’s somebody else’s job (dev lead, project manager, whoever) to look at the issues we know about, determine what we have time to fix and determine what is worth the effort that is required to fix it.
As you said, you can’t determine something isn’t worth the effort required to fix if you never notice the problem in the first place.
Its like you read my thoughts! You seem to grasp so much about this, such as you wrote the ebook in it or something. I believe that you just can do with some % to power the message home a bit, however instead of that, this is great blog. A great read. I’ll definitely be back.
Can’t comment again as an engineer or developer, but as a Mom, I was always amazed at what you and Jim would focus on…dungeons and dragons….mazes…things I had never really thought about…hours and hours…the generational issue perhaps plays apart…Abby and Marty will take you places you have never been, Martin. Do our experiences wire our brains differently? Maurine