Go and See It.

I’ve been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Go and See It podcasts. Yes, I know that this is strictly an ad for Lexus, and I know it’s Gladwell—I’ve written on being conflicted about him before—but the podcast’s close examination of how people who are maniacal about design is compelling.

I noticed something else. I quote data in a lot of my posts—92%, in fact—because I’m told that readers want to see data. And because it fascinates me, right back to the Bill James Baseball Abstracts of the 1980s. Data can enlighten us and can illustrate thing and can help us to navigate biases, if it is done right.

But there’s more to the world than quantitative data, a lesson I’m afraid we might be losing track of as workers in Metricopolis.

“Go and See It” is a Japanese concept which pretty much means what it sounds like. You need to go and experience something first hand to understand it. It’s really just qualitative data (if we’re back in school) but it can truly add context and understanding to data.

For example, one of the chief designers of Lexus came to the United States and visited car shows to learn about our car culture. I’m not talking about car shows in Exhibition Halls, I’m talking about those car shows in a Wendy’s parking lot on a Saturday morning. I once heard something similar on Marketplace. As Kikkoman was introducing soy sauce to the US, one of the dynastic sons of the company started the project off by standing at a display in an aisle of an American grocery store…to understand the American food shopper better.

Imagine seeing American car owners brag about their cars, or hearing American housewives about the decisions they make to feed their family. You don’t find that in a crosstab. You probably won’t find it in a focus group. You might not even be able to put what you learned into words, yet understanding is the beating heart of effective communications.

Ask any creative person where they get their ideas and they will tell you that they come from the world around them. A good illustration (sorry) of this is a new set of content from The Economist. The magazine’s covers are iconic, sort of like the New Yorker, and every week you can get an email detailing how the week’s cover was developed, from sketches to the final product. It is fascinating, and more often than not the final design is something that an artist saw from the bus on his or her way home.

As Bunk told Kima in The Wire, you have to have “soft eyes.”

There are cautions, though.

First, lies can hide inside columns on a spreadsheet and our eyes can deceive us. We’re never more dangerous than when you saw something with your own eyes.

The second is related. It’s confirmation bias. If you stand in the grocery store and just try to gather evidence for what you wanted to do in the first place, you wasted the money on the plane ticket.

The third is that you need an innate curiosity, which certain people don’t have. You have to wonder.

If you do, and you’re willing to go out in the field, you might be surprised at what you learn.