MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

If you have ever won­dered why you couldn’t con­vince your wife to buy that Fer­rari, or why your cus­tomers don’t seem to ‘get’ what you are des­per­ately try­ing to sell them, it’s really not your fault. Our Chief Math­e­mati­cian revealed these mys­ter­ies through the power of maths/physics/scientific proof.
Below is his bril­liant pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing our last idea-sharing meeting.

Knowl­edge Trans­fer and the Prob­lem of Per­cep­tion: The Achilles Heel of Logic

This is some­what related to a lot of what Ken­neth has said about gen­er­at­ing big ideas. Before I start explain­ing my con­cept, I will briefly explain 3 math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts –self-organizing sys­tems, Gödel’s incom­plete­ness the­o­rem, and the Chaos the­ory– and I’ll use those in my expla­na­tions. They all sound very high­fly­ing but the con­cepts are very simple.

1. Self-organizing Systems

Self-organization is a process of attrac­tion and repul­sion in which the inter­nal orga­ni­za­tion of a sys­tem –nor­mally an open sys­tem which con­tin­u­ously inter­acts with its envi­ron­ment while main­tain­ing its state– increases in com­plex­ity with­out being guided or man­aged by an out­side source.

The brain per­ceives things through a self-organizing sys­tem; it is not linear.

Imag­ine you are stand­ing in front of a box of sand. If you start pour­ing water into that sand, it will form a par­tic­u­lar pat­tern and start flow­ing along those par­tic­u­lar lines. Even if you pour in more water, it will essen­tially con­tinue to flow along only in that pattern.

In the same way, the brain is a self-organizing sys­tem. When infor­ma­tion goes in, it flows only in a par­tic­u­lar pattern.

2. Gödel’s Incom­plete­ness Theorem

What is it? It states that any log­i­cal sys­tem has state­ments which are simul­ta­ne­ously true and false.

Let’s use lan­guage as an exam­ple, because lan­guage is a log­i­cal system.

In lan­guage, there are some state­ments that are both true and false. A very famous conun­drum is, “If God can do every­thing, can He cre­ate a stone which He can­not Him­self roll?”

If it is true, then this state­ment is false. BUT, if this state­ment is false, if you think about it, it is also true.

It is a basic prob­lem of lan­guage because any log­i­cal sys­tem will always con­tain those kinds of state­ments which are both true AND false.

That is Gödel’s incom­plete­ness the­o­rem, which brings us to the limit of logic. Gödel’s incom­plete­ness the­o­rem shook the math­e­mat­i­cal world by show­ing that logic itself is incomplete.

3. Chaos theory.

The chaos the­ory, in essence, states that even a small change in a sys­tem can cause a very big change in the outcome.

Now, I’ll begin to con­nect all these con­cepts to the main idea I want to share with you, which is the prob­lem of per­cep­tion, and the Achilles heel of logic and knowl­edge transfer.

How do you trans­fer knowledge?

When you trans­fer knowl­edge, how do you do it? Nor­mally, you talk and try to come to a log­i­cal conclusion.

Many times it works, but some­times, it doesn’t.

For exam­ple, if some­one tells me that this is a chair, I could argue that it is not a chair but a table. But if some­one says that it is an ele­phant, I wouldn’t know how to explain that it is not an ele­phant because it is so different.

When you face the kind of prob­lem that you can­not even begin to explain how to explain it, it means that it is not a prob­lem of logic. It is a prob­lem of perception.

What is perception?

Per­cep­tions are the pat­terns which are formed by self-organizing sys­tems. If you apply logic to this, and yet your per­cep­tions are dif­fer­ent, you won’t reach any conclusions.

You have to go back and look into your per­cep­tions, not logic, because, as Gödel’s the­o­rem has shown us, logic has flaws.

Even if your per­cep­tions are even slightly dif­fer­ent, they may lead to very dif­fer­ent results. How­ever small the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion may seem, because of the Chaos the­ory, you will reach very dif­fer­ence con­clu­sions and obtain very dif­fer­ent results.

In order to trans­fer knowl­edge in the right way, you have to under­stand first that there are lim­its to logic. Pro­ceed log­i­cally and if you can­not do it log­i­cally, don’t argue more! Go back and check whether or not your per­cep­tions match.

You don’t have to change your per­cep­tion in order to under­stand where the other per­son is com­ing from.

You don’t need to change your per­cep­tion –you just need to under­stand the other person’s perception.

For exam­ple, in many East­ern coun­tries, when you give some­one money, they count it in front of you. But, if you go to a West­ern coun­try, if you were to count your money in front of the per­son who’d handed it to you, they’d feel offended. Although you may under­stand it, your per­cep­tion is different.

Hence, hav­ing a per­cep­tion is dif­fer­ent from under­stand­ing a perception.

O.K. Why is this impor­tant, again?

I’m glad you asked.

When you plan your mar­ket­ing strat­egy, you need to under­stand the per­cep­tions of the cus­tomers’ in your par­tic­u­lar niche –this is why the cus­tomer avatar is so important.

One area in which knowl­edge trans­fer and per­cep­tion affect busi­ness very deeply is infor­ma­tion mar­ket­ing, which we do a lot of. It involves pack­ag­ing your infor­ma­tion in a way that is not only log­i­cal, but falls in line with the per­cep­tions of your tar­get audience.

Isn’t it fas­ci­nat­ing that sci­ence always has an answer for everything?

Last 5 posts by

• The Enlight­ened Entre­pre­neur Expe­ri­ence: How To Expe­ri­ence The “Turn­ing Point” And Com­plete Free­dom In Your Busi­ness — Jan­u­ary 25th, 2010
• Tribal Mar­ket­ing: Sur­pris­ingly Eth­i­cal Ways to Sig­nif­i­cantly Reduce Your Unsub­scribe Rate And Eas­ily Boost Prof­its — Jan­u­ary 19th, 2010
• Break­ing the Silence — August 7th, 2009
• How Rela­tion­ship Mar­ket­ing Trumps Tra­di­tional Direct Mar­ket­ing (and Why the Social Media Craze Is Mostly Hype) — March 31st, 2009
• MindValley’s Social Media Mar­ket­ing Unveiled — Decem­ber 2nd, 2008

About the Author

Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

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