Off the ball

Film one basketball player for a whole game, only him, and the footage is strangely dull.

He jogs to a corner and stands there. He takes three steps towards the basket and stops. He raises a hand for a pass that never comes. For long stretches he seems to be doing very little, and a stranger watching the clip would wonder why he is on the team.

Put the camera back on the whole court, at a weekend game in Jeddah, and the same movements make sense. The run to the corner pulled a defender with him, which opened a gap for someone else. The raised hand was a decoy. He was busy all along. What he did only looked small because it had been cut away from the four people it was meant for.

That is true of most good work, and it is easy to forget when judging it. We take a single part and examine it alone: one line of copy, one photograph, one person's share of a project, one step in a customer's day. On its own, the part looks ordinary, sometimes almost lazy. The verdict that follows is confident and wrong.

People do not experience the parts. They experience how the parts meet: what passes between people who know each other's habits, the friction when something unfamiliar arrives among the familiar, a combination nobody quite planned. That is what they came for, and none of it survives being pulled apart.

The isolated part was never what anyone was watching.