Can You "See a Situation as It Is"?

Consider an activity in which:

...you throw yourself into an arena with a few basic rules but which largely involves making up your every move on the spot.
...you must stay flexible so you can react immediately to the unpredictable moves of your fellow participants.
...you must process rapid-fire input, staying focused on your ultimate goal while avoiding unproductive tangents.

I’m talking, of course, about driving, probably the truest form of improvisational activity that the typical Daily Improviser regularly experiences. In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt reveals some intriguing physiological and psychological aspects of navigating the highways that can also shed some light on the concept of mastery that I discussed in earlier posts.

In the book The Three Laws of Performance, Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan define “mastery” as “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” In Zaffron and Logan’s view, “If you have beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears about [a] situation, mastery means putting these on the shelf so you are not looking through them at what is in front of you.” Masters commit to seeing a situation as it is, tearing down the intervening “screens” of assumptions, problems, and past baggage.

Seeing a situation as it is. This may sound like a somewhat daunting challenge – and judging from our experiences with our daily driving routines, as Tom Vanderbilt points out in Traffic, it may be even more daunting than we realize.

Vanderbilt refers to studies of an entire category of crashes, those known as “looked but did not see” accidents. In these types of accidents, “drivers were looking directly at a scene but somehow missed a vital part – perhaps because they were looking for something else, or perhaps because something came along that they were not looking for.”

To illustrate this “looked but did not see” syndrome, Vanderbilt cites a study concerning the frequency of car-motorcycle collisions:

“Many people assume that ‘failure to see’ [the motorcycle] means that the motorcycle itself was difficult to see because of its size or its single headlight. But it may also be that car drivers tend to be on the lookout for other cars when entering an intersection or turning across a lane of oncoming traffic. They may be in a sense ‘looking through’ the motorcycle, because it does not fit their mental picture of the things they think they should be seeing.”

(While driving, have you ever had this experience of “looking through” something that seemed to come out of nowhere but which, in retrospect, was in front of you the whole time – but which you just didn’t expect to see?)

Vanderbilt then quotes a researcher who concludes the following from the study:

“The common intuition is that we first see things in the world and then interpret the scene in front of us…. What this [study] shows is that it’s possible that the idea you have in mind actually precedes the perception and affects what you see. Our expectations … of what’s in a scene influence what we see in a scene.”

The Daily Improviser’s driving experience can reveal just how much we "create" our own reality (often unconsciously) based on preconceived ideas and expectations - and shows how much of a challenge it can really be to meet Zaffron and Logan’s “mastery” criteria of seeing a situation as it actually is.