Pareidolia is the psychological tendency to perceive vague and/or random stimulus as significant. For example, remember that grilled cheese sandwich that had a likeness of the Virgin Mary on it… I think it sold for something like $28,000 on eBay in 2004. Similarly, remember the supposed “hidden message” in certain songs when they are played backwards.
Psychologists explain this existence of this phenomenon in terms of our preference to find order in chaos (often necessary in ancient times for survival).
It turns out that our brain doesn’t like randomness or chaos and therefore will work to ascribe some meaning to it… even if the result is completely nonsensical.
So why the psychology lesson…
…well because I see owners and managers falling victim to pareidolia all the time. One CEO that I know berated her health club manager because he didn’t implement spinning classes until a couple of months after a local competitor.
Why all the angst?
Well it turns out that the CEO’s club was struggling and she seemed to have formed the view that her much more successful competitor (who did have spinning classes) was actually much more successful because of those very spinning classes.
Of course, it wasn’t the case (it’s rarely about one thing and never about one class) and even when she did eventually get her spinning classes up and running her club was still unsuccessful… and her tenure, it turns out, was rightfully quite short.
Obviously, we have to make judgement calls every day but we have to be careful that the reality that we construct reflects reality as it is… or as business luminary Peter Drucker more eloquently put it, we must have ” …the ability to see the world as it is, not as we want it to be”.




