(3 votes)
Loading ...Eyes Wide Shut: Filtering Signal from Noise
This morning I was walking at 5th and 52rd Street in New York on my way to a meeting. Traffic was at a standstill, people frustrated, horns blowing, due to President Bush being in town with his motorcade. As I’m walking up 5th Avenue, I encounter a blind man also walking with his cane. He looked a little flustered. With New York at a standstill, and no sense of movement, he had lost his “signal” for deciphering what was going on. Traffic was gridlocked. Congestion was outrageous. We struck up a chat and he asked what was happening and I filled him in. We chatted for maybe 3 minutes over two blocks. As the cross town motorcade passed at 55th and traffic started to move, I was amazed at his instinctive ability to regain his navigational sense – he once again found the signal within the noise as we walked. Not only could he carry on a conversation, he navigated by sound at the same time. He didn’t need an iPhone with Google maps. He didn’t need eyes, because he had internal vision. An intuitive sense based on deciphering the signal. And an amazing sense of processing that signal in real time.
It’s yet another example of separating the signal from the noise. Its easy to be distracted with the technology and tools, the emerging trends, the mountains of data, the noise around us. Our customer experience “traffic sense” can sometimes seem at a standstill. Often it’s about listening, internalizing, and understanding intuitively what’s going on. Close your eyes, regain the signal and you’ll be on your way.
Excellent post. It brought to mind some of my early days in college - where we learned about things like Signal Detection theory (SDT) and it’s implications for systems design and usability. The fundamental principle was - to your point - that there’s signal, and there’s noise…and that an operator must differentiate the two streams in order to be successful (i.e., in 1 of 4 ways - Hit, miss, false alarm, correct reject). This principle seemed intuitive to me at the time because it implied a dichotomous choice: Yes, the signal is there - “hit the button”, or “No, keep listening”. But a lot has changed since 1966. The signal and noise aren’t 2 separate streams anymore. The paradigm isn’t about straining to hear the tick over the constant hum anymore…at least on most days. The problem now is that everything has become a “hit”. Everything is relevant. And as consumers of information, we’re remiss to exclude anything. The central problems therefore becomes, “how do we decide what’s relevant when everything is relevant? “How do we decide what to exclude?”
If I had to pick one key challenge to overcome in my own practice it would probably be this. Everything is relevant. There isn’t any noise, anymore.
So how does a modern experience planner succeed in a world where the signal is always on? To expand on Neil’s point, we need to listen more than ever before - that’s a given. But not to everything…We need a radio with an adjustable frequency band that we can fine tune depending on the insights we’re trying to gather. Internalizing is the process by which successful and experienced practitioners know how to adjust their radios to find the clearest station, with the best music, that’ll make the most people get up and dance.
Great post Neil.
In the book, “The Opposable Mind”, author Roger Martin offers up an analysis on integrative thinkers who have attained great success in their careers through their ability to make decisions by NOT making trade-offs between variables but by realizing that everything, as ePlanner writes, is relevant.
Martin defines this type of thinking as, “The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each…integrative thinking shows us a way past the binary limits of either-or”.
I closed my eyes and danced on my desk this morning. Thanks to both you and ePlanner for your thoughts.
Maybe everything is relevant (I’m not convinced that’s true) but not of equal value. We all have to prioritize.
I get to practice prioritization almost daily. I’m a writer. When I need to generate ideas, I gobble all the information I can. That’s really all I can control: how much or how little I take in. It all winds up in the back of the brain somewhere.
In time, I apply myself to creating ideas and almost magically, the answers spill out. Clearly, all by itself, the brain is capable sorting and combining information into useful packages. Even if the original information was complementary or contradictory.
Like Neil said, it’s intuitive. No question. For me, in this business, it’s important to learn about all the tools old and new.
But we must always remember it’s not about us and our toys. Digital, traditional, whatever. It’s only about the customer/consumer/client/user and his or her product or service. That is the only beacon that should guide our applied thinking.
Humans have an amazing ability to recognize patterns in completely random, stochastic, series. In fact, pattern recognition is among the first cognitive skills that infants develop.
People sitting at the roulette or sic bo tables arguing over ‘systems’ is a great example. Our ancestors imposed an order on the stars by drawing crazy Zodiac symbols on them. The entire discipline of statistics can be traced back first to predicting gambling outcomes, and then, shortly thereafter, to quantifying random noise and imposing a method of quantifying randomness.
Pattern recognition is really at the root of our nature.
Recognizing a pattern often isn’t the hard part. The hard part is discerning which patterns are caused by real phenomenon, and which are really just background clutter. As Neil’s example demonstrates, to derive a key predictive insight, the challenge is not only to recognize the pattern, but it’s determining which patterns matter, and then go one step further in determining the root cause. Frequently, thinking about a cause requires you to strip out patterns that are irrelevant. It’s about making a fool out of randomness, not being fooled by randomness. Discovering that causal variable is a great aha moment, and the most exploitable
That’s fascinating, Chris. I wonder if that’s why we respond so fundamentally to music. Given that animals do also, though perhaps to a lesser extent, they too may be tuned at some level to recognize patterns.
ePlanner - Agree - it is about knowing where to look and how to listen. It’s easy to assume that it’s all signal, but the role we have to play is one of synthesis of all the inputs into what’s really relevant. All that “noise” can become a distorted signal unless we apply the filters. I like your radio dial analogy. That’s where the fun of our jobs comes in, in knowing how to tune in to the right indicators. THat doesn’t mean tuning out the others. Certain metrics or observed behavior will jump out in defining an experience. Others will be more noise tier. I’m reminded of a researcher that could frequently look at the stimulus or questions and formulate a likely outcome based on having done similar research before. That’s the value of specialization.
Julia - please post a photo of you dancing on your desk. I hope it was the happy dance! I love opposing ideas and rationalizing the best path given the business and customer demands.
Steve - great tie back to the discipline of writing. I spent five years early in my career as a writer. And it was always about “finding the headline.” Insights are based on finding the headline in the noise.
Chris - I love the line “making a fool out of randomness”
Great comments all. Thank you!