Editorial: The People Who Notice

A few days ago, I came across a post on LinkedIn about pricing.

It showed two versions of the same bottles side by side. In one, the price appeared above the product. In the other, it appeared below. The question was which version sold 35.2% more.

Except the price wasn't the first thing I noticed.

The labels were different.

One set of bottles had white labels. The other had black labels.

And my immediate thought was: Then how do we know it was the price?

Maybe it was. I don't know. The image certainly wasn't enough to tell me.

But I kept thinking about my reaction to it.

I had been shown something and explicitly told what to look at.

And I noticed something else.

Which sent me down a completely different line of thought.

Who are some of the most valuable people in an organization?

Not which roles.

Which people.

I think it's the people who notice.

The people who notice that the same exception has been made four times.

That something described as temporary has quietly become permanent.

That two teams seem to be solving different versions of the same problem.

That everyone says something is a priority, but the decisions being made suggest otherwise.

That a conversation feels different than it did six months ago.

That nobody asks a particular question anymore.

That a process technically works, but only because someone has learned how to work around it.

These observations can seem small.

Sometimes they are.

But organizations are full of information that doesn't arrive neatly packaged as information.

It appears as friction. A change in behaviour. An unusual question from a customer. A workaround. A repeated exception. A meeting that suddenly feels different. A result that looks good until someone notices what had to happen somewhere else to produce it.

And usually, before any of those things can be understood, somebody has to notice them.

Noticing isn't knowing

I think this distinction matters.

The person who notices something isn't necessarily right about what it means.

The LinkedIn post is actually a good example.

I noticed that the labels were different. That doesn't mean I know the labels affected sales. It doesn't mean the placement of the price didn't. I simply noticed another variable. Something that made me ask another question.

And I think the same distinction matters inside organizations.

Someone may see a pattern where there isn't one. They may correctly identify that something has changed but misunderstand why. They may notice an important symptom and recommend exactly the wrong solution.

Noticing isn't diagnosis.

It isn't judgment.

It isn't expertise.

And it certainly isn't authority.

It's simply the recognition that there may be something here worth paying attention to.

That sounds almost trivial until you consider how much organizational thinking depends on it.

We can only investigate the patterns we see.

We can only question the assumptions we recognize as assumptions.

We can only reconsider the practices we realize have changed.

We can only diagnose the problems that somehow become visible to us in the first place.

Organizations get used to themselves

Maybe this is the part I find most interesting.

Organizations normalize remarkably quickly.

A workaround happens once because of an unusual circumstance. Then again because the circumstance isn't quite so unusual anymore. Eventually nobody calls it a workaround.

A meeting exists because it once served an important purpose. The organization changes, the purpose disappears, and the meeting remains.

A decision creates an unintended consequence. People adapt around it. Eventually the adaptation becomes part of how the work gets done.

None of this requires incompetence or bad leadership.

It's simply what happens when people live inside a system long enough.

We get used to things.

Which makes the people who continue to notice especially valuable.

Not because they necessarily know what should change.

But because they're still able to see something that everyone else may have learned to walk past.

The question is what happens next

I suspect most organizations already have these people.

So perhaps the more interesting question isn't whether they exist.

It's what happens when they notice something.

Can someone say, "This may be nothing, but I've noticed..."?

Can an observation exist for a while without immediately becoming a complaint, a recommendation, or a problem someone is expected to solve?

Can someone notice something outside the boundaries of their role without being told, implicitly or explicitly, to stay in their lane?

Can a weak signal travel far enough through an organization to reach someone with the context to understand what it might mean?

And perhaps most importantly, does the organization know the difference between listening to an observation and agreeing with its interpretation?

Because creating room for people to notice doesn't mean treating every observation as fact.

It means treating observation as information.

Something to consider.

Something to connect with other information.

Something that may turn out to be insignificant.

Or something that may eventually explain quite a lot.

Before we can understand

Organizations spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how people make decisions.

We develop governance structures. Clarify decision rights. Build dashboards. Establish operating rhythms. Define accountabilities. Train leaders to exercise better judgment.

All of that matters.

But there is something that comes before almost all of it.

Someone notices.

They notice that something has changed.

That two things don't quite fit together.

That a pattern may be emerging.

That what we're seeing doesn't quite match what we expected to see.

They may not know what it means yet.

Maybe nobody does.

But before an organization can understand what is happening, someone has to notice that something is happening at all.