First, I'm flattered and honored at the traffic, comments, twitterings, phone calls, emails and Skype sessions generated by I'm the Intersection of Four Statements. I'd like to clarify a few things based on some of the phone calls, emails and Skype sessions. First, Modality Engineering has very little to do with how the brain functions and very much to do with the results of its functioning. People who've seen my presentations are familiar with my "There are only so many ways the human mammalian brain can function (barring organic trauma)." statement
This means that when I, Susan and friends gather around a bonfire (you're welcome to join us. There are few things as enjoyable as a fire in the dark, reaching to the stars, especially on our mountaintop in the quiet of winter, and that's exactly what this is about) each of our brains is processing much the same sensory information (heat, light, ...).
However, it also means that each of us responds differently to that sensory information. Some might be startled by the explosive cracks of the splintering wood, the sudden bursts of sparks like minimeteors falling to the earth.
Some might feel comfort from the cold, from the night, from the glowing eyes in the trees ringing the field.
For Susan and me, it is an invitation to re-experience our histories and trainings. Consider that someone whose personal mythology includes Creator had a beautiful daughter whose eyes burned brightly and whose hair moved and pulsed on its own, covering her children with a blanket of life. Her skin was always warm and healing because Creator gave her the power of the Sun.
Two young men saw her and asked her name. "My name is Fire," she told them. The two young men were hypnotized by her beauty and each vowed to take her as his wife. Creator told them they must first learn how to respect and honor Fire, then they must pass a test. is probably going to have a very different experience of fire than most people raised in a western cultural paradigm.
These differences between {heat, light, ...} and {comfort, fear, memory, ...} are the differences between objective and subjective experience (there are some links on this difference at the end of this post). Modality Engineering deals with the mathematical understanding and interpretation of those subjective experiences.
These differences between subjecting and objective experience deal with everything and has a name, Galileo's Curse. Most people don't know that Galileo, Locke, Newton and others valued subjective experience more highly than objective experience. Their feeling was that anybody with a thermometer could determine the temperature of something, but to understand what "warm" meant to someone from the Arctic versus someone from the Tropics?Now that was learning.
And had meaning.
This variation in meaning is tied to marketing and branding and (I'll bet) that when the concepts are "warm" and the cultural differences are Arctic and Tropic, the difference in subjective experience is obvious.
I'll also bet that it's not. At least it's not unless you've spent lots of time in the Arctic and the Tropics. My guess is that most people reading this live in the Temperate Zones. Long term extremes of hot and cold are things read about, seen in movies or tv shows but not long term experienced. This means that most people reading this have a romanticized concept of Arctic and Tropic life, not actual experience.
And until you have that actual, objective experience you will not be able to communicate subjectively about similar experiences to people in those markets.
Or any other markets. Or to market them anything. The easiest and quickest way to lose an audience is to claim you share their experience then prove that you don't.
This is also where Modality Engineering and all the NextStage tools derived from it have their worth. Our Evolution Technology (ET) hasn't had those experiences, true. What it has done is learned from everyone it's ever interacted with how they subjectively measured those experiences.
Knowing these subjective measurements from a large enough audience, it can create mathematical models of those subjective measurements. These mathematical models become NextStage's Rich Personae (see links below), NSAI, and a host of other tools.
The difference between NextStage's tools describing how an individual or group will react versus a bunch of humans sitting around a table making marketing decisions is that NextStage's tools have no biases, no preconceptions and prejudices of their own, they neither marginalize nor romanticize what they don't know. NextStage's tools report mathematical certainties. They do not guess.
And this last item, not guessing, is why we strongly suggest interested companies and individuals take our trainings. You have to learn to recognize your own prejudices, preconceptions, biases, etc., and put them aside to use NextStage's tools to everyone's ultimate benefit.
Then again (and this is our opinion, our bias, our prejudice and preconception) you have to learn those things in order to be a better human being.
But we're a weird company anyways...
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- Subjective and Objective Experience Links
- Websites: You've Only Got 3 Seconds
- Reading Virtual Minds
- For Pay Paper - What We're Learning About Visitors From Websites
- Rich Personae Links
- From TheFutureOf (11 Nov 08): Responding to Steve Jackson's 16 Sept 08 6:52am comment
- From TheFutureOf (10 Jul 08): Back into the fray
- BizMediaScience Rich Personae Archives
- Get the attention you're already paying for
- Intrusive Little Windows or "DeBranding Made Easy"
- Intelligent Website Design: Expand Your Market
- The 4th Annual SNCR Research Symposium & Awards Gala at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, 5-6 Nov 09
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