In the dark days of Covid, I set up a toy experiment on the place we used to call Twitter.
I was fascinated by my coffee machine. In particular, the patterns that would emerge on the top of my morning Latte after preparation. Unlike in posh coffee shops where a trained barista will create intricate patterns, my brew had a milky, coffee-y splodge on the top.
But many mornings, I could swear I could see things in those splodges, and I was interested to know if others could, too. Coffee Rorshasch was born.
As with many of my experiments, the hypothesis was a little more than “I wonder what will happen if I post a photo of the top of my coffee onto a Twitter account on a semi-regular basis?”
The answer was a few things:
- occasionally, some smart Alec would respond to the question “Say what you see” with “A cup of coffee”. This should become one of those “Are you a robot?” tests because not understanding the context and responding with the obvious, particularly if you are neurotypical, means you can’t be discerned from a machine these days.
- some of the coffee images resulted in everyone seeing the same pattern
- and some of them resulted in a broad, diverse set of things seen.
A whimsical experiment and a ton of photos of the tops of cups of coffee in my photo library today. Sadly, Coffee Rorshasch has died, as it’s not nearly right-wing enough for X.
However, the thing that Coffee Rorshasch was tapping into has become something with which I’ve become increasingly fascinated in recent months – the phenomenon of apophenia.
Apophenia is the word that describes the human brain’s remarkable ability to spot patterns in random information.
It’s assumed that this ability and its related phenomenon, pareidolia (in which we see things in random places like clouds or coffee cups), gave us some sort of evolutionary advantage – spotting tigers in long grass enough of the time to run away to avoid being eaten, for example. A few false positives are worth the effort in that case.
It’s risky, too, though. Many of us need to know that things happen for a reason. Whether it is religious cults, conspiracy theories or losing gambling streaks, apophenia has a part to play in people using random information to justify acts in detail. More commonly, perhaps, the phenomenon of Confirmation Bias where we seek out the data that supports our theories is apophenia in action?
But what if we could harness this power and use it to be able to help us see problems from new angles. Rather than fitting the random data to a problem, we use the random data to re-frame the problem?
I’m currently working on a workshop to explore this, and I am thinking about three ways apophenia can be “hacked”.
The first uses images and visual metaphors, a technique that I have used extensively. I have a box of random photographs (you can download the photos here if you wish).
I will lay the photos out on a tabletop (or spread them out on a Miro board for online workshops) and then ask participants to answer some questions using random photographs.
Sometimes the questions are a direct appeal to the emotions of the participants – Pick two photos, one that explores how you feel today about the project, and one that explores how you want to feel in six months
Sometimes they’re a bit more abstract – Pick a photo that signifies what success will look like.
In all cases, the photos, a huge mass of random information, can help people break out of their normal patterns of thinking and stop giving just “stock” responses. They certainly could use a photo to reverse engineer themselves to a strongly held opinion, but even that takes effort and thinking. Only very occasionally will people refuse to play the game (usually an “I chose this photo because I like bikes/puppies/cake” type response).
The next is a variant on an idea that Simon White and I used a few years ago called The Creativator. Whilst that particular example involved a complicated cardboard contraption (all the instructions to build one are on that link), you can get the same outcome with just Artefact or index cards.
The Creativator uses random input for idea generation.
We recently used it in our team to brainstorm new ideas for marketing campaign activity.
First of all we brainstormed out ideas across three categories of thing: potential marketing channels, our products and services, and our audience groups. Each of the ideas was written onto a card.
Therefore, from that first phase, we had three piles of cards, each with a different thing written on it—products and services (“data strategy”, “Platform development”, “Service design”, and so on), channels (“Playbooks”, “Dinner events”, “Conferences” etc.), and audience groups (“CTOs”, “CMOs”, “People who have been customers in the past”…).
To generate ideas you then shuffle the cards and lay them out…
You still needed to think, but the random data provided many jumping-off points for new ideas.
The technique can be used wherever you can describe categories in this way.
The final Apophenia hack uses shuffled cards that are then laid down in particular patterns where the cards have particular significance. This is the mechanic at the heart of tarot and underpins the Business Meerkat cards I’ve been working on recently, which will be the subject of a blog post in the future.
I’m going to be running a version of this workshop at the IT Directors’ Forum in May, and hope to take it to a few other events later in the year. If it’s of interest, please do drop me a line by email or on LinkedIn and we can also see about running some more sessions.
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