The Short View
What we miss when we only see the problem in front of us.
A while ago, I was sitting outside with a friend at a café, one of those warm late-summer afternoons with Autumn just around the corner. He'd gone for the luxury strawberry tart, and within a few minutes we had company: two or three wasps, drawn in and circling the table.
He waved them off. They came back. He waved harder, and they grew more interested, not less. Then, with a kind of weary decisiveness, he folded a napkin and… swat! Dead. Another arrived; the same.
I felt myself flinch – more sharply than the moment seemed to warrant. Something in being witness to the casual finality of it caught me, and stayed caught long afterwards.
This is what I have since learned about our wasp friends. A wasp this late in the year is no real threat to you. It's foraging – turned out of a nest that no longer needs it, following sugar and scent. And killing one sets something off: a crushed wasp releases an alarm pheromone, a chemical flare that signals to every nearby wasp that there is danger here. The swat meant to end the problem is the thing that escalates it.
So the gesture fails on its own terms. The practical irony is almost beside the point, though. What stayed with me was the question underneath it – what were we actually responding to?
Discomfort, I think. Ours, not the wasp's. A small irritation that the imagination promotes into a threat, until removing it feels not only reasonable but urgent. And in that swat is a habit of mind most of us share: we see the thing in front of us as a discrete problem, and we don't see the web it sits in. The wasp was a nuisance at our table. It was also a forager, a pollinator, a sender of signals, a part of something with its own order. We registered the first and were blind to the rest.
That blindness is worth thinking about, because it doesn't stay at café tables.
Consider a decision being made in a lot of organisations just now: a role looked at on a spreadsheet, judged by the tasks it performs, and cut on the reasonable-sounding logic that a tool can now do those tasks more cheaply. The tasks really can be automated; that part is often true. What the spreadsheet doesn't show is everything the role was holding that never appeared in a job description – the context passed sideways to a colleague, the client whose unspoken worry it managed, the small daily translations between one part of an organisation and another. Cut the tasks, and you cut the web too, and the web was doing more than anyone had thought to measure.
We're watching this play out in real time. Many of the companies that removed roles on this logic have since found themselves hiring people back – not because the automation failed at the tasks, but because the work the role had been doing invisibly began to come undone elsewhere: coordination fraying, judgment missing, the unspoken needs of customers going unmet. Some have spent more time and money reassembling what they dismantled than they ever saved. The alarm pheromone, you might say, reaching the rest of the nest.
None of this is really about the technology. The same tool, in the hands of someone who could see the whole system, gets used quite differently – to take the drudgery out of a role while keeping the person and what they hold, to automate a task without amputating a relationship. The problem was never the bothersome wasp. It was taking it out without registering what else was in the room.
Once you notice the habit, you see it at every scale. The bus route or the branch library written off as uneconomic, until the web it held – the place people met, the eyes on the street – is gone and missed. The team member whose questions slowed the meeting down, who turned out to be the one still asking what everyone else had stopped noticing. The same move, repeatedly: judge a thing by the nuisance it presents, remove it, and find out too late that it was bearing an important load.
I don't think the answer is to stop acting or to treat every irritation as sacred. Some wasps do need to be ushered away; some roles really have had their day. The invitation is smaller and harder than that – to notice the moment between the irritation and the response, the half-second in which we decide something is simply in the way, and to ask, before we act, what this thing might be holding that we can't yet see.
That half-second is where a surprising amount of our judgment lives. It's the difference between removing a problem and tending a system – and it's available to anyone, in the smallest moments of a day, which is, I suspect, where leadership is mostly decided, long before it reaches a boardroom.
So I've been left with a question since that afternoon at the café, and it isn't really about the wasp. How often do I do exactly what my friend did – to an idea, a person, a possibility – and dismiss it as a nuisance, without a second look?
Sandra Cunningham - Outside In