Instant Recognition . . . And Solutions
I was talking to a business executive recently about a piece of writing he wants to use in a public presentation. He’s been working on it for a couple years now. He’s never considered himself a writer. He wants to get this piece just right in time for a presentation at an Ivy League school.
My friend, whom I’ll call X, is a business strategist and finance expert. He visits manufacturing plants and explores their layout, machinery, labor process–their whole operations–to figure out what works and what doesn’t. He also dives into the books, looking for odd arrangements and opportunities. In conversations with plant managers and line workers, he tries to figure out how the plant really works–not just how they say it works in reports to corporate headquarters.
So I was encouraging him to let me help identify the best passages of his piece for his presentation. He hesitated.
“Look, it’s like this,” I said. “When you go into a plant you can see what no onbe else can see. You can see the problems and issues that are invisible to everyone else, even–or especially–the suits back at corporate. I’m like that with documents. I can look at any document–20 pages, 50 or 100 or 200 pages–and instantly figure out its shape, its holes and redundancies, what’s worth fixoing and what needs to be scrapped.”
Then I thought about sexers and chess masters.
A sexer is someone at a poultry farm who can separate baby chicks by sex in an instant. A circular conveyor belt rolls the chicks toward the sexer–fast. Think of Lucy in the candy factory on the old “I Love Lucy” show. The sexer picks up the chicks, instantly decides whether each one is a “him” or a “her,” and sorts them accordingly.
Sexers can do what they do because they spot patterns, based on a vast trove of memories of doing this work. Joshua Foer, writing in Moonwalking with Einstein, explains how chess masters do the same thing:
Chess experts don’t look more moves ahead. They didn’t even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the chicken sexers: They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.
They weren’t seeing the board as 32 pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and as systems of tension. Grandmasters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements show that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they’re absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes dart across greater distances, and linger for less time on any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and the spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move. (64)
As impressive as chess experts are for sure in random arrangement of chess pieces – ones that couldn’t possibly have been arrived at through an actual game – the memory for the board was only slightly better than just novices. They could barely remember the positions of more than seven pieces. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?
“Ah,” X said, “I get it.” He passed along the draft, I looked at it, found the bext pieces, and all was right with the world.
I can help you too.
Whatever you’re working on–a memoir, novel, analysis, report, speech, RFP, proposal, web copy, annual report, you name it–I can help you figure out how to take it to the next level. And I can do it fast. I have three decades of experience working as a writer and editor. I’ve worked on every variety of document.
Because of this experience, I can spot the invisibles–like X or a sexer or a chessmaster–and figure out what to do next.
Give me a call. It will be the best investment you ever made.
Also see http://ratthing.com/?p=23
