Observe: Building Your Think Slower Skills Toolbox
It's fitting that Observe — the "O" at the front of the OABCD Skills Toolbox — is the outlier in the sequence. It stands out, purposefully out of alphabetical order, as a reminder of its critical importance.
What you'll learn
- Why "Observe" sits at the front of the Skills Toolbox
- The 3 levels you can move across
- Six key questions to boost your Observe levels
- Common pitfalls to avoid
- Four smart ways to Observe better in your day-to-day life
- Three ways to challenge yourself today
Why this matters
The attention premium hits hard. You aren’t a fruit fly, but you might clock new information like one — shifting topics or tasks within milliseconds.
Still, you’re doing the work. You’re dependable, smart, and well respected.
Yet deep down, there’s a nagging feeling that progress comes slower than it should. Others seem to recognize patterns, navigate situations, and make better decisions faster than you do.
So you push on, working harder, moving faster. But all the hard work misses the mark.
You leave meetings grasping key points, but missing critical cues, like your colleagues’ hesitation, their guise of uncertainty, or unstated concerns. You research topics but focus mostly on conclusions instead of surrounding conditions and context.
You have all the information you need. But you shift into interpretation mode, making decisions, and taking action before fully observing the complete picture.
Observe is designed to close this gap, aligning what we think we saw with what actually happened. Because the very best builders, creators, and leaders all start by being the best Observers.
You’re in good company…
Charles Darwin spent years simply observing finches before a single theory emerged. Pixar's fabled story teams devote months to watching how real people move, react, and feel before writing a single line of script. Observation isn't pre-work. It’s the real work powering everything that comes follows.
Observation is a fading art. And the practice of quiet observation is deceptively hard.
Good observation arguably requires the most discipline out of any skill in the Toolbox. It is neither negative nor positive, totally pure in its reception of information.
- Absorbing information can involve inward or outward observation. It may include the five senses through reading, watching, listening, smelling, hearing, feeling or touching. It could encompass a fully captured idea or a summary.
- It’s not skewed, interpreted or adapted based on interpretation.
To truly observe is to take a wide and deep view.
Like the butterfly effect, every observed action is a small, integral part of a broader story — what happens before, after and surrounding it.
This is the art in the science: embracing the wide and deep (science), while also knowing when enough is enough (art).
Eliminating all bias is, of course, an unachievable quest toward perfection. Some element of our biases, background and behavior will always be infused into our observations; the goal is to minimize them.
But we can’t forever put off analysis. Let’s explore how to efficiently observe and when to know when to move on.
Observation at Work
Consider this scenario…
Despite strong internal confidence in the brand, your company’s brand perception and customer experience have become inconsistent across locations.
Your colleagues on the research team seek to understand why. They begin by observing customer behavior in stores, sitting in on internal meetings, interviewing employees and managers, reviewing prior customer feedback and research, attending industry trade shows, and comparing marketing claims against actual customer experiences.
The goal isn’t just to gather opinions, but to separate assumptions from observable reality while identifying any patterns that shape customer experience.
NOTE: Naturally, this is just one example of where the Observe skill applies! Observation can support leadership, parenting, strategy, creativity, relationships, operations, negotiation, education, and nearly every other domain.
Check out the next article in the Observe intro series:
The 3 Levels of Growth
Or skip ahead to any part of the series: