Because I was doing a lot of driving this week, I had time to listen to some podcasts and I listened to a recommendation from a  reader’s comment published in a Daily  broadsheet.

On November 14th 2000 near the coast of New Mexico, Commander David Fravor - a US Navy pilot, observed a Tic Tac shaped object suspended in the air that changed direction many times without accelerating or decelerating. When he tried to intercept  it the object vanished so fast from their field of view it was astonishing. One of the unknown unknowns that became apparent was that this object was using a propulsion technology  that we humans don’t have. As a marketing researcher I was struck that another pilot making similar forays complained that the naval ship radar operators hadn’t warned her of what to expect. David Fravor explains on the podcast that the radar operators had no idea of what the blips on the radar screens represented, they didn’t have the information to even name the blip phenomena let alone describe them to a new pilot.

I was struck because although my work might not be as exotic as a US Navy pilot because I am limited  to examining human behaviour in the marketing space my work is similar.  It is to explore how people behave, the contexts and why. This sort of research does produce surprising data - stuff we hadn’t been looking for - the unknown unknowns -  which surface from observation.

Sometimes in your organisation you have blips and you need a behavioural pilot like me to go in and map out what is happening.  

This could be the beginning of a making an exciting new capability  such as developing gravitational field propulsion.