ABSTRACT
Sustainable redesign needs to be based on what people actually do. My practice is to call the direct observation phase of Process Redesign “Learning to See”, a phrase that acknowledges the insights of Lean teachers such as John Shook, gathered both in person and from his text with Mike Rother (Rother and Shook 2003). It also allows me to refer to the work of one of my intellectual heroes, the late David Marr (1976), a pioneering cognitive neuroscientist who was interested in human vision, in how we humans learn to see. For David Marr, bringing something into vision is not a passive process. The brain and the mind do not simply function as a kind of video camera attached to the retina. Neural code is transformed into a picture of the external world by reference to a detailed model of that world based on learning, experience, and innate processing capacity. Bringing an object into vision requires seeing and looking. Seeing is the process of the external world impinging on the vision faculties. Looking involves choosing where to direct attention. Seeing a scene, the brain starts by developing a simplified model of what is looked at, which is then further processed into a detailed representation of the external world that allows the looker to make sense of what he or she is looking at.
