Observing Me, Observing You, A-Ha!
Earlier this week, I had cause to think on Sherlock Holmes’ famous remonstration to his erstwhile pal and biographer, John Watson: You see, but you do not observe. As to why I was reminded of Holmes’ remark, well that is a tale too long in the telling; suffice to say, I was thinking about the nature of observation.
As we have discussed in Columns past, there is something perhaps slightly unsettling in the world of modern physics whereby the act of observation, changes what is being observed. In the famous double-slit experiment, firing particles of light through two slits creates an interference pattern on a screen behind them, which, I’m told, is the classic signature of a wave. Light, it seems, travels as a cloud of infinite, uncommitted possibilities. Yet the moment someone in a lab coat and safety goggles sets up a detector at the slits to determine which route an individual photon actually takes, the wave function instantly collapses. The light stops behaving like a wave of pure potential and snaps into a single, localised particle. Stick that in your pipe, Sherlock! Don’t you know, old fellow, that objective, non-invasive observation is actually a myth? Watson might have said, had he been able to call upon a passing acquaintance with the quantum realm. Or, as John Berger puts it in Ways of Seeing, we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
As a much younger ex-Director, I was very taken with the idea that somehow just looking at something can change it. As if it is the mystical gaze of a conscious observer that forces reality to choose a particular path which it wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t being observed. Like a dog trotting toward a kitchen counter laden with sausages suddenly remembering its lifelong dedication to good manners at the precise moment a human steps into the doorway.
My later understanding, as far as it goes, suggests that the reality is a bit more prosaic than that. In order to observe a quantum particle, you have to interact with it. You must bounce a photon off it, pass it through an electromagnetic field, or force it to swap energy with a detector. It is this inevitable transfer of physical energy; this interaction with the surrounding environment, that disrupts the particle’s delicate quantum state and knocks it out of its wave-like superposition. Simply by attempting to extract data from a system, we inject external energy and alter its natural state.
Erwin Schrödinger captured the subtle absurdity of this measurement problem with his famous thought experiment involving a cat sealed inside a steel box. The animal remains simultaneously alive and dead, held in a delicate state of quantum superposition, until an external physical mechanism forces an energy exchange that dictates a single, potentially messy outcome.
During my years at the chalkface, I have spent many a happy hour reviewing data dashboards and system performance indicators, and, it has to be said, occasionally wondering whether our relentless drive to capture every subtle nuance of institutional life was inadvertently forcing Schrödinger’s feline into a state of perpetual anxiety without us ever giving the mechanics of our measurement a second thought. A data dashboard may lack the atomic delicacy of a photon, but it nevertheless does exert its own formidable gravitational pull. To measure a complex human environment, one must drag it into a metric, convert nuanced relationships into neat numbers, and demand continuous reporting. The anxiety stems from the fact that the system is never allowed to just be; it is perpetually being poked with the diagnostic stick of quality assurance, forcing the poor cat to repeatedly jump out of its box just to prove it is still breathing.
In the late 1920s, researchers at the Hawthorne Works telephone equipment factory near Chicago set out to study how factory lighting affected worker productivity. Oddly, every time they turned the lamps up, output rose. When they turned the lamps back down, output rose again. It did not matter what physical variable they manipulated; output increased simply because the environment had been injected with the tense, watchful energy of a group of well-dressed men standing on the periphery with stopwatches and notebooks. It must be said that later interpreters have picked at the data, and the original findings look thinner than the legend suggests. But the story is so good that it has survived the evidence against it, which might tell us something. But such things are for other Columns…
(Whatever the verdict on Hawthorne, its cousin is beyond dispute. Goodhart’s Law holds that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.)
This Hawthorne Effect could be seen as a natural feature of any structured human enterprise. In modern education, robust systems of quality assurance, evaluation, and performance monitoring play a vital and necessary role. They provide clarity, ensure equity across large organisations, and establish the essential scaffolding that allows complex schools to function effectively. Without clear metrics and structured evaluation, institutions risk drifting into ambiguity. Yet, like the researchers at Hawthorne, we ought to recognise that the very act of setting up a monitoring framework introduces a fresh surge of energy into the system. The moment a process becomes a key metric, people naturally adapt their behaviours around it, generally towards performance and compliance.
If every diagnostic interaction involves a transfer of energy that subtly alters the system being measured, then the particular quality of attention we bring to organisational leadership becomes a deeply fascinating question. In his sweeping work on brain hemisphere differences, The Master and His Emissary, friend of the Column Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!) argues that the two halves of our brain yield fundamentally different types of attention, and that this attention is not merely a passive lens through which we view the world, but a creative force that disposes reality itself.
The left hemisphere, McGilchrist notes, operates with a narrow, targeted, and deeply transactional gaze. It sees parts rather than wholes, searching for utility, categorisation, and mechanical efficiency. It wants to pin things down, isolate variables, and assign scores. This aspect of mind is invaluable for designing policies, auditing compliance, and ensuring administrative rigour. The right hemisphere, by contrast, brings a broad, open, and relational attention to the world. It is attuned to context, atmosphere, unquantifiable culture, and what (I think) Rainer Maria Rilke called Anschauen; that patient, non-judgmental gazing that allows a thing to reveal itself on its own terms, amidst the living flow of human relationships.
McGilchrist’s core insight is that the world we experience is continually co-created by the balance of attention we pay to it. Both modes of attention are vital for healthy leadership, but an over-reliance on left-hemisphere metrics alone can subtly flatten an organisation. Looking back at what might laughably be called my career hitherto, it is far more characterised by administrative housekeeping than any real leadership, and so, very many more times than than once, I have found welcome refuge in the neat logic of the left hemisphere. It is of course entirely understandable that when trying to make sense of an organisation, spreadsheets and performance benchmarks provide a sense of order. Yet the quiet trap for any of us is that we begin to view a vibrant human environment through the narrow lens of a grid, overlooking the reality that the tools we select to track our work will always colour the way that work appears to us.
To round out this tangle of physics and neurology, it is worth turning to the French philosopher and stalwart friend of the Column, Simone Weil. In a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet in 1942, she wrote of how attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She meant something demanding: a willing suspension of our eager desire to judge, classify or immediately fix the object of our gaze. In Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies, she went further and argued that the true purpose of schoolwork is not the acquisition of knowledge at all, but the training of attention. It is of course not the case that the two purposes cannot go hand in hand, but if my time on Strictly has taught me anything, it’s that in a dance, one must lead and one must follow.
There is a striking contrast between the aggressive energy of a quantum detector and the generous, receptive attention described by Weil. My suspicion is that there is ample room for both. Structured evaluation frameworks give us necessary precision and accountability, while Weil’s receptive attention allows us to remain attuned to the unquantifiable human elements: trust, morale, and intrinsic motivation, that make true growth possible.
It is entirely understandable that in a modern, data-rich world, our instinct is to lean on measurement, monitoring, and clear visibility. We naturally tend to feel that to understand any complex enterprise, our best route is to illuminate it, break it down into manageable parts, and map its progress on a grid. Yet the lessons of physics, psychology, and philosophy all offer a fascinating counter-balance: when we focus heavily on evaluative energy within a living system, its more subtle, unquantifiable qualities can just wander off somewhere else and remain remarkably elusive.
None of this means that we should abandon our essential frameworks of accountability or pretend that institutional leadership can operate in a vacuum. In my limited but long experience, school systems are a dense, interconnected web of shared responsibilities, where leaders, staff, pupils, and communities are constantly adjusting their orbits in response to one another.
Perhaps the real gift of understanding these subtle mechanics lies simply in the recognition that our administrative frameworks are never entirely neutral, that our diagnostic tools carry their own weight, and that finding a thoughtful equilibrium between necessary measurement and genuine, relational attention will always shape the kind of community that reflects back at us.
So keep the dashboards by all means; the cat, I’m told, appreciates the attention. But somebody still has to do the observing, and Holmes was right about the difference. Your ex-Director will endeavour to spend less time seeing and more time observing.
Until next time, Happy reading / observing!
PS I am, as usual indebted to my colleague and Editor in Chief, Dr Byers for the topic of this week’s Column. If you, dear reader, have a suggestion for the subject matter of a future Column, please do get in touch via the usual channels.