When the Proxy Starts to Feel Real
How often do we work with reality vs a version of reality acting as a stand-in?
So much of modern work is dealing with proxies instead of the real things our work is for.
A customer is a real thing. An HR needs hearing is a proxy. It’s been filtered by someone else’s thinking. A survey is a proxy. A report is a proxy. A theory from Harvard about communication is a proxy, too – real communication never feels so clean, simple, with guaranteed effectiveness.
Proxies are not “bad,” per se. Sometimes they can show us something we couldn’t see even when the real thing was staring us in the face.
But proxies are still stand-ins.
I think you could probably do good work by staying very close to reality and using very few proxies. The reverse sounds pretty risky to me now.
Years ago when I worked for a big communications training company, I remember realizing we were living in proxy land. But we couldn’t see it, because proxy land felt real.
This realization helped me understand why some amazing training materials bombed. I developed them in my head, using a lot of proxies for our actual clients and with assumptions about how they should respond.
It became clear over time – to do truly good work, I needed to keep closer contact with all the real things, and keep remembering that the proxies were stand-ins for reality. This led to a shift in my thinking: a fixed training agenda doesn’t really make sense for my work.
If I build an agenda using theory, past experience, and an imagined picture of how people should respond (proxies!), I can build an agenda that should work. The real thing is the actual people in the room and their real reactions in real time.
So I had to start designing differently. I had to design loose enough that the real situation could always cancel the plan in my head.
The practical implication was that my training needed less of a progression of stages, and instead just a bigger box of tools in my mind. If I had enough tools, when reality shifted beneath my feet, I could change the agenda on the spot and work with what was actually happening.
I am curious to hear from others – what proxies in your work do people sometimes confuse for the real things they are supposed to represent? How does this impact the quality of the work, or the motivation?
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