[Vertebrate Pests] The Keen Observation Olympics

Who in your company is the most skilled observer? Is it you? Is it the sales leader, the trouble-shooting veteran with 20 years under his belt? Could it be the customer service representative that spends all week in the office? Or maybe, it is the “new guy” hired just one month ago? Actually, the answer could be any of the above.

But why the question? Well, for occupations associated with public health and/or food safety (i.e., pest management), being a skilled observer is paramount. In fact, good observational skill is a prerequisite for performing effective pest management. In truth, pest professionals are actually obligated to be able to see what others overlook. This is because several of the more significant urban pests do not reveal themselves readily. They are secretive in their behaviors (cryptobiotic). To be able to identify the sources of urban pests (which is often essential for controlling or eliminating them), it requires attention to details — sometimes very subtle details.
For example, consider the relatively high levels of callbacks in many commercial establishments with cryptobiotic rats, mice, carpenter ants, cockroaches, warehouse beetles and small flies. These pests demand from us a high level of investigation and alertness — or keen observation — if we are to control them efficiently and thus profitably.

Keen Observers. The power of observation and the profits to be gained from being a keen observer (beyond just the monetary) have been written about by a number of notable scientists and philosophers over the years including Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle (i.e., Sherlock Holmes), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bernd Heinrich, Henry David Thoreau, E.O. Wilson and others.

So what defines a keen observer? Well, as a start, both ability and attitude are required. For the ability part, dictionaries define a keen observer as: “a highly developed ability and quick understanding in knowing how to watch carefully and attentively, and to take note of or detect things in the course of (scientific) study.” To define the attitude of a keen observer, we can paraphrase from the authors above, “one who explores, experiments, thinks, analyzes, draws objective conclusions on research data and asks the salient questions needing to be asked.”

Keen observations can be made on things (e.g., the structural components of a room, the voids of equipment where pests may be hiding) or between things (a mole mound vs. a gopher mound, etc.). Keen observations become even more important when we discuss living things such as the obvious differences between animals (e.g., hawks and robins, ants and beetles, dogs and cats, etc.) or between living things that to the untrained eye appear alike, but to a keen observer are obviously different, such as a roof rat and a Norway rat, pavement ant or odorous house ant, mourning dove vs. city pigeon, and so forth.

KO Olympics. Let’s return to the question asked previously about the observers in your company. Suppose you held a miniature “Olympics” among the staff of your company where each “athlete” was timed with a stopwatch for 15 minutes inside one of your company’s chronic callback accounts (where the pest problem is confined to a specific area).

The goal of this Olympics is to perform a race for keenly observing and making a numbered list of observations relating to the relevant factors and/or conditions conducive to the pest problem within the 15 minute allocated time. (Obviously, the person conducting the Olympics would a day or two beforehand prepare by doing their own keen observation inspection of the locale and compile a list of salient conditions and relevant factors.)

I personally have conducted several KO Olympics with different pest management groups and companies over the years. As you might expect, one person usually wins the gold, another the silver, the bronze and so on. Interestingly, I have found that the gold does not necessarily always go to the most experienced employee (i.e., the veteran with 25 years “under his belt”). I have seen new technicians excel over the experienced (and vice versa). Moreover, it is not rare for an office staff employee who answers the phones all day (i.e., doesn’t go into the field) to best several of the technicians who spend all their time in the field. In other words, experience alone does not necessarily make for, or define, a keen observer.

One representative outcome. What follows is the outcome of KO Olympics of a company staff of about 23 employees and three of the firm’s field technicians showing the typical range from low to high observational skill. The room in which they were asked to perform keen observations contained some furniture, file cabinets, boxes and, relative to pests, a particular yellow partition wall. Here is an overview of the results:

• Technician No. 3 (two years of OTJ experience): “A partition wall painted yellow.”
• Technician No. 12 (two years): “The yellow wall was concrete hollow block.”
• Technician No. 9 (four years): “The yellow wall was an uncapped hollow block wall facing the south and west sides (i.e., the warm side of the building), with two unsealed penetrations into the base of the wall.

As you can see, among three technicians, the “observations” ranged from one technician “seeing” a wall as part of the room to another technician “keenly observing” the same wall. Professional No. 9 did in fact “take the gold” in the overall exercise noting seven relevant observations compared to only two for his peers. Also, notice the progression of how the keen observer was able to “see” how things were associated to one another.

The same room, the same time, the same wall and the employees of the same company — all these things were the same — but the results were not. If you are a client needing a solution to a persistent and recurring pest problem, whom among these employees would you want showing up for the job? Or, if you are the supervisor scheduling the work, whom should you send?

No two things are alike. The power of keen observations teaches us that in nature (where pest management work precisely resides), no two things are ever exactly alike. On my own commercial/residential pest control route that I ran for three years, I recall thinking, even multiple times, “Here it is again, the same second Wednesday of the month, just like last month and the month before.”

I also was servicing a chain of convenience stores that sold identical products, seemed to have the same building size and design, and store layout. They were all totally alike (I thought). But I had not yet trained myself to be a keen observer. I should have realized that each pest management service situation is different and there are no two identical urban buildings and clients. I had lazily reduced them to “being alike” in my mind to simply repeat the work and keep it easy.

To this issue, the famous poet, David Wagoner, wrote in one of his poems: “To the raven, no two trees are alike.” Of all the birds he could have selected to put into the tree, why do you suppose he selected the raven?
 
The author is president of RMC Consulting, Richmond, Ind., and can be reached via e-mail at rcorrigan@giemedia.com.