The Forbidden Decision: Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts in Innovation

“Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about”

But if we can bypass the hardwired opponency, we can access a perceptual filling-in mechanism that will yield the Forbidden Decision…

We should not be able to see yellowish-blue, or reddish-green. We are hardwired perceptually to attempt to amalgamate these colors to produce a singular hue that can be simplified. Ie. Our perception + cognition attempts to render a swift and simple conclusion that satisfies our need to understand what we are seeing. The resulting conclusion is generally accepted by ourselves because it is largely the result of our own rationalized conditioning.

Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about….

But under the right condition, we can induce the “Forbidden Conclusion”. Perceptually, we can create a color palette such that a viewer will in fact see opponent colors flowing together(Scientific American, Feb 2010, pg 75). Thereby rendering a perception of what should in fact be incomprehensible. It presents a challenge to the viewer because it is something that has never been encountered, and can lead to momentary confusion, but importantly, the perception is not rejected.

In the color experiments, the “forbidden colors” were perceived only when the opponent colors were represented with identical luminance. Luminance is essentially “brightness”, and the inducement of forbidden-perception requires that the luminance be identical. It has been determined that by mirroring the luminance, the flickering effect of changing opponent colors is minimized, thereby making the transition between opponencies as transparent as possible. i.e the transition is less “startling” and therefore leaves a smaller cognitive disintermediation footprint.

So, how does this apply to innovation in the workplace?
1. Change is often capable of being defined as set of opponent concepts.
a. Just as Red vs Green are opponent colors, some may perceive that:
i. Casual and Business are opponent
ii. Distance and Intimacy are opponent
iii. Games and Work are opponent
iv. Service Quality and “face-face alternatives” are opponent
2. As with colors, our a priori hard-wired perceptions can be defeated if we are precise in our presentation of the opponent pairings. With colors, this is luminance. So what is the equivalent of Luminance in the context of business?
3. Contextual Change Opponency in Business
a. As with opponent color-swapping, the reduction of flickering when 2 opponent colors are rapidly alternated was the means by which forbidden colors were perceived. The brightness of the colors needed to be massaged such that the luminance was identical
b. The concept is: hold as many variables as possible constant, such that the cognitive-sensory disruption is tightly focused on a precise variable.
4. Organizationally, it might present as:
a. Face-Face vs 3D Immersive meeting spaces
b. The context, and variability between the 2 concepts must be contained, such that only the target variable is perceived as changing, and not the entire universe of variables
i. Therefore, if we consider *only*: face-face images, vs Avatar-Avatar images, we can contain the spectrum of sensory-cognitive change parameters
5. How to neutralize the luminance of face-face and avatar-avatar?
a. Take a Point-of-View photograph of 1-1 meeting in a real meeting room
b. Render a photo-realistic head from a photograph
c. Swap the Avatar head onto the 1-1 meeting counterparty.
d. Rapidly alternate between real-real, and real-avatar.
e. Additionally, create a POV photograph in which the viewer is meeting 1-2(eg. Viewer is meeting with 2 people)
i. Swap an Avatar head onto a single counterparty, and rapidly alternate between Real-real-real, and Real-real-avatar.
6. In this example, the luminance is perceptually defined as a combination of contextual visualization parameters
a. Contrast, color, shading – must remain precise
b. Avatar head must be of extreme quality(no goofy hair)
c. While this is a “photoshop” experiment, the avatar head must be expertly pasted into the photograph to appear seamless

The purpose of this exercise is simple: to advance a tiny step towards overcoming a common condition of hardwired opponency in business that conditions decision makers away from accepting that Virtual can be a “good enough” approximation of reality. The defeating of this perception is results in the “Forbidden Decision” that VR can be effective in the workplace.

Next steps include the one-by-one introduction of virtual elements into the photograph flip book. By Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts, we are able to minimize cognitive disintermediation(i.e. we are not startling) and are able to tightly focus our audience on a single, discrete change variable, without incurring a rapid retreat to a more comfortable hard-wired opponent reaction(i.e. it will never work).

Innovation in Education? Contradictory Terms?

In reading a post just now regarding the lackof innovation in education, there were a couple of examples provided, and this sparked a couple of my own observations from first hand experiences:
From the Article:
1. Great innovation coming out of universities is accomplished despite the university(Shawn Fanning/Napster is the example)
- I think this is a fair point, and we quite often see precisely the same thing happening in major corporations. A corporate employee who has a fantastic idea, will quite often leave the company to pursue the idea. Maybe this is for IP reasons, but it is also due to the lack of support within the organization for innovation. In many large companies, certain people on certain teams are the "designated innovators". If you are not part of that club, you are on your own.
2. Educators are focused on content, not mediums & methods
- I see this in universities as well as corporations. In each scenario, curriculum designers(sometimes overseen by compliance/audit) need to ensure that specific information is relayed to the student. Especially in corporations, the burden is to to ensure that you can document the fact that the student saw the content, and passed a quiz on the content. Sometimes as much as 80% of the educational effort is in tracking course completion, rather than ensuring the learner comprehended and can therefore deploy the knowledge
From my own Experience:
1. Education-lifers(those that studied to become teachers, and are currently teachers), tend to have a very different take on teaching methods then those current teachers who may have spent a career in Business, and then decided to become a professor.
- I will admit that almost all of my contact with educators is either at Universities or Corporations. I can generally tell almost immediately if an instructor was educated to teach, or whether the educator is teaching based on life/work experience. In my opinion, educators with a history of work experience inherently ensure that the information they are communicating is done so in such a way the learners are involved in understanding the implications for "knowledge execution". If you have lived/breathed knowledge-execution for 2 decades, you will almost certainly focus your teaching style on the end-objectives of having/using this knowledge. And in many cases, these educators will seek the best methods possible for communicating information. (don't get me started on the Pedagogy/Andragogy debate)
2. Quite often, education does not employ the same tools as business
- In my consulting practice it is not unusual to see a corporation using one set of tools to train employees, then see another set of tools given to the employees to do their job. We would not train car mechanics this way, why do we train corporate professionals this way?
3. Very often, educational software providers do not focus on what their customers(and the customers students) are asking for.
- This is my favorite so I saved it for last. I am presenting at an upcoming educational conference and the gist of what I am going to say is: we must educate the workforce of tomorrow(and today), using the tools that they will be using on the job. Now, depending on the industry, these tools will certainly be more innovative then asynchronous text messaging and powerpoint in a browser. I work with curriculum designers at Universities and corporations helping them understand what tools are available - and not just what their approved vendor has told them their product can do. There is a massive difference. I also have spoken to major LMS providers(for Universities and Corporate), and these folks have told me(and they believe what they say) that their customers only want what the vendor is currently providing. Hmmm, maybe the vendor only talks to procurement or IT? Because I get a very, very different message when I talk to professors and students. To the LMS vendor, the "customer" is the Payer. Who writes the checks? An LMS vendor must ensure that the check-writer is happy. And we should not assume that the check-writer is constantly communicating with the professor, or that the professor is always taking the pulse of student likes/dislikes. I suppose we could also argue that people won't want what they don't know exists. This however does not equal contentment. Students and Professors know what they like/dislike, regardless of whether they know about choices. Awareness of alternatives will however change how people respond to what they like/dislike(hope for improvement may spark action).