It is a deeply jarring thing to realise someone can see right through your digital camouflage. An old friend, Rajesh Srivastava, did just that the other day.
Life rarely unfolds with photographic clarity. The trick, therefore, isn’t gathering more clues but spotting patterns in the incomplete. (Above) At first glance, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation 31 (1913) seems obscure. Look closer, and a battle at sea emerges. (Wikimedia Commons)
My WhatsApp display picture is a Picasso-like sketch of me drawn by my daughter some years ago. It looks nothing like me because it is an abstract, fragmented distortion. No one in my contact list has ever referred to it as a portrait. Why would they? (Now, hold on to that question.)
Earlier this week, while in conversation with Rajesh, who is a corporate executive-turned-author, he asked, “Who did your portrait?” I told him. “It’s brilliant. You must encourage her to take up art,” he said. He had guessed it was me, and guessed the maker was young enough to still be at the stage of making that choice.
That he read all this into the squiggles surprised me. But what also struck me was the question: What might be hidden to me, in my everyday world?
I began to wonder: Why are most of us so oblivious to abstraction?
The modern world has a peculiar relationship with this sphere.
Take money. Fiat currency is ultimately just an abstract construct, relatively new, and existing only because a critical mass of human beings collectively agree that it has a given value.
The same applies to companies, countries, laws, stock markets. They are all rooted in stories we collectively agree to believe so that the world doesn’t spin into chaos.
What truly boggles the mind is: We are trained to think that only the literal is real. And yet we convince ourselves the chart is real; the spreadsheet is real; the quarterly target is real. Everything else is treated, in fact, as mere decoration.
By early adulthood, the abstracts from the worlds of work and money have become so real, they are taking hold of our lives. At the cost of the truly valuable intangibles: friendship, time with loved ones, rest.
The tension between empiricism and agreed-upon construct also explains why massive organisations spend millions collecting raw information and still fail fundamentally to understand the reality shifting around them. How can data help them predict what will work and what will fail, when logic and science play so small a role in determining what people will spend on, why, or when?
Then again, as Rajesh and I acknowledged, information and understanding are not the same thing. And understanding is certainly possible — if one can learn to appreciate and navigate the abstract.
Take my core profession: journalism. Two reporters can attend the same press conference, hear the same speeches, and yet one can return to the newsroom with a routine, literal transcript of a story, while the other returns with the exclusive that lay hidden beneath the words. The difference is in their insight and interpretation. Their capacity to infer meaning from incomplete signals, connect dots that do not appear connected, and recognise a pattern before it becomes obvious to the crowd.
As Rajesh and I continued speaking, he traced this habit of mind to his years at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K), where his technical curriculum was intentionally balanced by deep dives into visual art, design and behavioural psychology. Years later, as CEO of the consumer-goods company JK Helene Curtis, those early frameworks enabled his teams to subvert deeply entrenched consumer habits.
The company’s eau de cologne was often stored as a medicine by households, to break a child’s running fever. The traditional approach would have been to pour money into finding a new market. But Rajesh and his team worked on the design.
They created visual cues on the packaging that told people to welcome visitors on hot days with cold towels dabbed with eau de cologne. For that matter, to add a little bit of it to the final laundry rinse. It worked. The product soon jumped out of the medicine cabinet and became a freshness asset.
As he spoke, what struck me was not the specific commercial triumph of the campaign, but the fundamental habit of mind that made it possible.
Back to the display picture, what fascinates me isn’t that he recognised a portrait hidden in the squiggles, but that he looked at something obscure and expected meaning to be there.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that success in almost every field depends entirely on that difference. It doesn’t come from merely gathering more raw data or building more sophisticated spreadsheets. It relies on the ability to look at a handful of incomplete clues and ask a deceptively simple question: What am I really seeing here?
Life, after all, rarely unfolds with photographic clarity. More often than not, it arrives looking like a sketch by Picasso.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
