Lose the Bubble

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lindsay calling from Coronado, California.

Hiya, Lindsay. Welcome to the show.

What’s up? What can we do for you?

Yeah, I had a question come up.

I was in a group Facebook chat with some friends, and I was trying to track what kind of plans we had made.

So I used the expression, I’ve lost the bubble.

We have young children, so some of the women in the group thought I was referring to playing with bubbles, but I just thought it was a common phrase.

That I’ve lost the bubble. You know, what’s going on? What’s the plan?

Any military people in your background?

I’m a veteran, and some of the people in the group are veterans or spouses of Navy.

So I thought it might be a Navy terminology because there are, you know, inclinometers and other sort of old nautical equipment that have bubbles in them.

That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Did you serve on a submarine?

No, I was on a surface ship.

But yeah, the inclinometer, which is the name for this meter on submarines that shows the angle at which they’re diving, right?

And then there are similar devices, similar gauges on airplanes that show whether or not they’re flying at the horizon, flying level, basically.

And in both of these kinds of transport, you need these so that you don’t crash.

And it turns out, if you go back at least the 1950s, probably earlier, you will find to lose the bubble to mean, you know, I’ve lost control of the ship.

And then later, even now, it’s extrapolated. And when you lose the bubble, generally, it means you lose the overall picture of a situation.

Like aircraft control people, they need to kind of keep all this data and all of these planes and everything that’s happened in their minds.

And if they can’t do that, then they’ve lost kind of this overall picture.

And you will find this come up in management books.

You’ll find this come up in military theory books where they talk about a commander’s need to stay on the bubble or to keep the bubble.

So is it a literal bubble, like a carpenter’s level?

Yeah. Yeah. Think of a carpenter’s level like a spirit level that’s got the bubble that floats back and forth in the liquid.

And if it’s between these two guidelines, then that means that you’re level.

It’s kind of like that.

I mean, obviously, they’re more sophisticated than that on the more sophisticated machine.

But generally like that.

That makes sense.

So you lost the bubble.

Yeah.

Okay.

But you’re saying your friends didn’t catch that reference or they didn’t understand what you were saying?

Yeah, and I meant it more in the loss of situational awareness sense, but then I just didn’t know where it originated.

And maybe it’s something that was passed down because I have, you know, more veterans in my family.

Yeah, that would explain it.

That was just something I was used to.

But I do see it show up in business theory books and business management courses and that sort of thing.

I do find it popping up outside the military now, but it definitely started with aircraft and then not long after with submarines and then became kind of a figurative use over the following decades.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Yeah. How about that, Lindsay? Your instincts were right on.

All right.

Thanks so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So one of these books, Trapped in the Net by Gene Rochland, he says, those who man the combat operation centers of U.S. Navy ships use the term having the bubble to indicate that they have been able to construct and maintain the cognitive map that allows them to integrate such diverse inputs as combat status, information flows from sensors and remote observations, and real-time status from various weapons.

I mean, we’re talking like that kind of mental presence of being in the zone so that you don’t even have to consciously think about it.

You just know.

Keeping that bubble right between.

Another thing they talk about, it reminds me very much of writing, like writing books and your need to get in that zone.

And they talk about the overlap between two different kinds of managers so that the bubble can be passed from manager to manager.

And when you write books or you write something complicated, you know how hard it is to get back into the writing later after you’ve put it aside?

You need that ramp up time.

Oh, yeah.

If an email interrupts you or you put it away for a few weeks.

That, to me, what they’re describing here in this larger situational awareness, very much feels like losing the bubble when the attention bubble is popped, so to speak.

I should say, by the way, there are many other terms related to being on the bubble, but they’re not this one.

There’s some from sports and how teams are ranked or being in a precarious situation or precarious ranking.

But those are a different kind of bubble related to more like actually being perched on top of a bubble of soapy.

Something very fragile.

Yeah, something fragile, yeah.

Very interesting.

Well, that’s a military term that should see wider use, I think.

Yeah, it probably will fall into those lists of most hated jargon, though, after a while.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s useful now, but after a while it will just seem irritating.

Was there a term you were talking about with your friends and they didn’t know what it meant?

Give us a call about it, 877-929-9673, or send it in email to words@waywordradio.org.