what’s photography got to do with it?
DATE OF ENTRY: 1-21-25
I purchased by first “real camera” of the prevailing “smartphone camera age” in January, 2023. At that time, I was writing profusely about the opportunity for Systems Thinking in the workplace on LinkedIn so my mind was already primed on “better systems” for thinking and decision making. But telling and teaching others about Systems Thinking still felt very intangible. People already thought they were being attentive to the system with their current decision matrices.
It hit me pretty quickly in my photographic journey.
I had this realization about how wonderfully the photographic process serves as a more tangible model for better decision making.
As a photographer, you have to become very intentional about your decision-making process if you’re aiming to be seen as a “professional” in either the high-end craft or fine art route…even more-so if you intend to have your imagery deliver something beyond the image itself.
I understand that we think we make conscious decisions in our day jobs and corporate careers but my experience with practicing photography revealed to me how unconscious we tend to be in those decisions…given how much they are driven by well-established and accepted sets of artifacts aimed at guiding, controlling, and managing the work. ( also see “Art vs. Artifacts)
So much of the apparatus’ of work is to not have to think about what to do next.
I’ve discovered how the photographic process slows down my thinking process so that I become much more intentional about it. I’ve become more conscious about the process. I’ve become more curious about other perspectives and possibilities.
These are traits that are needed in other work and business related decision processes…and life in general.
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the continuum
There’s something that I’ve recently realized about photography that further supports an emerging sense that the continuum could serve as a simple mental model for change and decision-making.
Photography essentially operates off the principle of a series of values falling along a set of continuums and the decision-making process involved in selecting the right value(s) for the desired outcome. Certain levels of impact require decisions to be made about very specific values and parameters. In other words, you can’t achieve the results without making the right choice for the level of impact you say you want to achieve.
Here’s another element of seeming intangibility of noticing where our decisions fall in relation to other decisions and photography providing a metaphor for grasping this process in a more tangible way.
We’ll certainly be expanding upon this as we go forward.
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NEW ENTRY: 2-11-25
One of the first “change” methods I had studied way back in 2013-2014 was Lean Startup. At that time, I was attempting a pivot to a craft beer consumer tasting profile app I had developed when a colleague suggested that I read Lean Startup from Eric Ries.
It was quite a foundation-shaking read compared to the very traditional Waterfall ways of developing a product that I had been trained on and exposed to many years before this.
The purpose of this entry is not to go into great detail about Lean Startup but to recall a “mantra” of sorts that appeared throughout Lean Startup presentations and events.
“Genchi Genbutsu.”
I’ve come to love this phrase because I think it carries so much importance and meaning…even more so now as a photographer!
We’ll get to that shortly.
Genchi Genbutsu was borrowed from studies of the famed Toyota Production System (TPS) back in the day. Line workers had an “andon cord” at their station that they could pull to halt production if they saw an issue. This would lead to the manager coming down to the production floor to understand the issue.
The manager would “go and see” what the issue was.
Genchi Genbutsu = roughly translates to “go and see for yourself.”
Photography leads us to get up and “go and see for ourselves” as photographers. Even better, when we share our images, it helps viewers also to “go and see for themselves.”
In a world and prevailing system where we tend to miss or ignore so much context and conditions, we need something that helps us learn to “go and see” both physically and cognitively in order to gain a better understanding of how to pursue the desire change before us.
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