Where the Victim Ate

Something we’ve been thinking about

Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, the hero of some seventy-five novels, was famous for having no method at all. Arriving on a case, he does not interrogate so much as move in: he drinks at the neighborhood café, eats where the victim ate, retraces the victim’s routines, and lets the rhythms of the place settle over him. Asked what he is doing, he can rarely say. Then at some point the people in the case stop being strangers, and he understands what happened before he can explain it.

How we see it through leadership economics

One way we think about good decisions is as a two-step motion: first expand the dimensions of the problem, then collapse them down to the few that matter. The collapse gets most of the attention, but its quality depends on the set it starts from. Expanding that set is the harder step, because concentration works against it. Concentration narrows what we notice, so the more determined our search, the more thoroughly we examine the dimensions we already have. Maigret’s wandering is Information Work of a particular kind: gathering the soft information people would not volunteer under direct questioning. It is a quiet form of work.

Psychologists who study creativity describe a relaxed, open state that works in a similar way: the mind’s gatekeeper eases, and more of what the senses collect gets through. Some unusually creative people seem to have a gatekeeper that filters less than most, and the extra information reaching them is part of what makes their thinking so divergent. Expanding the dimensions of a problem is not brainstorming a longer list, which is still concentration aimed at the set you already have, but rather letting your mind accept more than it would under hard focus. Reading that soft information well takes expertise and years of feedback, but seeking it out is available to anyone: you widen the set of inputs you allow to float in, the way Maigret orders another beer and keeps listening.

A line we’re sitting with

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet