Seeing what is invisible in plain sight

Going from product design to strategy, corporate anthropologists are requested to provide grounded statements not only on the present , what is happening here, but also on how we expect these things to evolve in the future. However I share Brigitte Jordan's opinion that predicting the future is not a reasonable task and that the best we can do is to "look at insidient trends, focus on developments under our noses".

This requires to adopt a focus in sight which is unfamiliar to ethnographers and work analysts, trained in working on the details on the present situations and not to get the dynamic, future-oriented picture. Of course, ethnomethodologists demonstrated how staging the details of our everyday interactions could help us describe the organizing model of our social rituals. Ergonomists from the French-speaking tradition of work analysis also hightlighted how the small events at the workplace inherited and reflected all bigger corporate contradictions. But practically, seeing what is invisible in plain sight requires first to step out of the situation. Grasping the general trends which everybody could see supposes a kind of revolution of the eye: looking carefully, at the details - but through the magnifying glass, with a stranger's eye. This indirect condition - the magnifying glass - may allow us then, as Gaston Leroux's hero Rouletabille, to see

"tout ce que nous ne voyons pas et qui est immense"

  all that we do not see and which is immense...