on seeing the target

i walked out onto my deck a few minutes ago; it was after sunset, the light was quickly fading. in this twilight next to the overgrown garden i completely failed to cultivate this year crouched a thing not normally in residence: a cat had come a-calling.

the cat wasn’t lounging around. its stance indicated it was hunting, but i didn’t see anything else in the yard. so i followed its eyes.

perfectly camouflaged twenty feet from the cat was a bunny rabbit. i hadn’t seen it—it blended perfectly with the dead grass and shadow and hiding is its business. but looking from the cat’s point of view i saw it dead on. its predator gave it away.

this got me thinking (harder than i usually do on a saturday): let’s classify the cat as an Actor. by following the Actor’s gaze, i saw its Target.

basic tactical analysis, right? prone to misdirection, yes, however: the cat didn’t know it was being observed, and i was not it’s target, and these are important contributors to the fidelity of the intelligence. i was, at that moment, a bystander.

as an exercise, let’s apply this to business.

let’s say you want users to look at your website. you don’t really know how to achieve that target, but you do know of several folks who are hitting it. what to do? look where they’re looking. find their target.

more specifically and personally, say you want to find a way to connect people that works, through a workflow that will be successful.

this is what we’re trying to do with FlowMingle. the target audience we’re seeking is fairly broad, but we should hunt one demographic at a time. in the immediate future, this’ll be via facebook, myspace, and other places where kids are likely to gather; kids are more likely to show us how our website and service should work than other people, because they’re hooking up pretty successfully via the net. if out target is to connect people, let’s look to where our good Actors are looking. there we will find a good solution. or at least some polish.

this thing applies all over the place, and it’s something i’ve known for a long time: if you want to see a target, look for an actor. if you want a specific target, look for an actor that’s after the same target. follow their gaze. i’d forgotten this lesson, or at least it’s concise exposition, and am grateful for the reminder. inspiration in twilight.

catching the rabbit, of course, is left as an exercise to the reader.