I recently went on a walk with a friend and her new dog, Davey. For a puppy, he’s pretty well behaved. He mostly sits, tries to stay, and often keeps off the furniture. But walking through the park was another story altogether. He was a barking machine. First it was a forty-something woman on the jungle gym. A mom retrieving her child? “Arf! Arf! Arf!” Next it was a man wearing a track suit and making slow, balletic movements with his arms and legs. A Tai Chi practitioner? “Arf! Arf! Arf!” After a while, I started to think Davey had an aggression problem. But now I think it may have been something else entirely.
Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner tells us that we make sense of the world through stories. When something doesn't make sense or violates our expectations, we tell a story about it to rationalize what we’ve seen. See that man in a suit talking to himself on a street corner? "Oh, he's probably using his Bluetooth." Your cube neighbor digging through the garbage? "I bet she accidentally threw away her sales report." And what about your otherwise dapper boss wearing Bermuda shorts to the staff meeting? "He must have spilled coffee on his pants this morning." We tell these stories to make the world make sense, and reassure ourselves that the universe is not a chaotic place. We believe that even strange-seeming circumstances have rational explanations - if only we can find them.
Dogs, on the other hand, have no such ability. Excepting Lassie, the average dog can no more tell a story than tie his shoes. So when something out of the ordinary happens, all a dog can do is bark.
That’s exactly what Davey was doing. He wasn’t trying to be aggressive. He was reacting to the violation of his expectations, in the only way he knew how.
It’s easy to forget how often we explain away out-of-the-ordinary events, dismissing incongruities in the world around us. Taking a walk with Davey was a good reminder of that. But it’s those very events that can point to the greatest opportunities for innovation and design. As innovators, maybe we should forget about market research – and just take our dogs for more walks.
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