My take on visualization at TEDx Viggbyholm.

On sunday night 18th april I was invited by Johan Ronnestam to speak on TEDx Viggbyholm. The subject of the day was visualisation. My line of reasoning went something like this (hastily translated into english).

My approach on the subject dealt with the importance of first impression, and if prejudice possibly has something to do with this phenomenon. I ask myself two questions:

1. Is style more important than substance?
2. What is it that makes us see what we see?

Besides the never-ending question about style and substance, I will try to cast light upon prejudice, and tell the story about the mysterious Dr Fox.

But first I would like to tickle your fantasy with a riddle.

A father and a son is sitting on a plane from Paris to London. After a while the boy gets curious about what makes the plane fly. So the flight attendant takes him to the cockpit, where the pilot shows him all the spikes and instruments. When the boy is satisfied and returned to his seat, the pilot leans towards the co-pilot and says proudly: »That’s my son.«

Now, how’s this possible?

The reason why many fail to see the solution is prejudice. And in this case it’s gender related.

The pilot is the boys mother.

I bet everyone in this room have preconcieved opinions. And I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a single soul on this planet that are completely open-minded. By preconcieved opinions I refer to stereotypic opinions or sweeping generalizations about a person, a group of people, a company, a football team, or a country, or whatever.

Most of us have been taught that prejudice restrict our thinking and our perception of reality – which of course is true. But few know that this coin also has a flip side, and I will elaborate on this later. First I want to emphasize that prejudice is a reality for everybody who works in the communication business. Here’s why:

When we communicate we use style and substance. Style is everything that meats the eye. By substance we refer to the content, or words. Which are always delivered with a certain tone of voice. Now, what do you think communicate most?

Is it the words?

Or is it the style, i.e. the body language?

Or is it the tone of voice?

Research shows that when people are communicating to each other, face to face, the words only constitue 7% of the communication.

The tone of voice makes for 38%.

And the body language (the style) as much as 55%.

This means that almost everything is already said and carved in stone before you even have had the time to open your mouth!

The receiver has formed his opinions about you within just a few seconds: who you are and the typical characteristics of your type. The rest is all about receiving validation for what the reciever already »know«. After the first impression everything you say will be filtered through the recievers biased opinions.

Henrik Fexeus, a famous tv show-host, proved this in a spectacular way some time ago. He wrote a political speach which he delivered at the youth associations of Moderaterna and Socialdemokraterna (if I remember it correctly). And he managed to impress both of the opposite organisations by style only – meaning his choise of clothes and body language. Both groups found the content relevant and interesting. There’s a simple reason for this. And here we come to the upside of having preconceptions about the world around us.

Here it is:

We live in a complex world, way to knotty for our senses to grasp. From this point of view it’s perfectly understandable that we want to picture it as safe and stable as possible. And that’s why we continuously are simplifying, rationalizing, generalizing and categorizing to find our way in life. Sort of like this:

To fathom the vast complexity of life, we divide it into opposites: Good vs. evil. Strong vs. weak. Left vs. right. Manly vs. womanly, etcetera, etcetera. Consequently, order comes with a price tag. And the price on order is truth.

This means that we lie to ourselves in order to create a reality we can understand and share with other people. A world that is meaningful. Because meaning is more important to the human brain than truth.

Incidentally, this was something that the researcher John Ware became aware of some forty years ago – and it happened in a rather peculiar way. He was in charge of a conference for a group of distingished psychologists and psykotherapists. This day he seemed a bit bored though. To spice things up he decided to play a prank on the participants. According to the schedule they were supposed to listen to a lecture on this highly interesting topic:

But instead of hiring a real professor, he engaged an actor, who was instructed to play the role as Dr Fox. The actor had no knowledge on the subject whatsoever. Ware instructed the actor to deliver the lecture with lots of humour, physical expression, plain gibberish, contradictions, and references to unrelated topics. He spoke for an hour, and then opened up for a half-hour of questions and answers.

So what do you think happened? Was Dr Fox exposed as a fake?

The answer is no. To John Ware’s infinite amazement, Dr Fox wasn’t found out. On the contrary. The audience thought that the lecture was stimulating. Furthermore, they found Fox’s examples both good and relevant. Someone even claimed that he have read one of Dr Fox academic papers.

Now, what does this all mean?

Well, all this implies that we are far more interested in the who’s communicating than what’s communicated. And we are more concerned about who sells something than what is sold.

It also means that our expectations colour our perception of reality.

Considering that the anonymity is increasing like an avalanche, and everything can be copied with little effort and cost – then style becomes more important than substance.

First impression is everything.

And that’s why design is more important than ever.

And, by the way, you can read more about this and lots of other stuff regarding universal creativity in my new book, Den mentala orgasmen (The mental orgasm), which will hit the bookshelves in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for your attention.