How to Build a Worldview Emerges from Deciding What You Will Not Handle

A worldview is not a state of visual consistency. It is the state in which what you hold to matter, and what you hold not to matter, is visible from outside as an order.

The methods on offer divide broadly into two directions. One is making the appearance consistent: fix three colours, match the texture of the photographs, build templates for posts. Consistency genuinely does tidy the impression, and a tidy impression is easier to remember.

The other is placing a common enemy — drawing the line between this side and that side first. This works too.

What the two produce, however, is not the same thing. Appearance produces identification; a common enemy produces belonging. Both still sit one step away from the state of I want to buy from that person.

Between identification and preference, and between belonging and preference, lies the same single step: what that person holds to be important comes across, and it overlaps with what you hold to be important. That step is not made out of colours or textures. It is made by the arrangement of judgements about what you handle and what you do not.

And where that arrangement stands, no enemy is required. The outline appears without anything being pointed at from outside. The moment you decide what you will not handle, the part you are not handling has become the outline. Put an enemy in place without the arrangement standing, and the outline keeps the shape of the enemy. Change the enemy and the outline changes, so little accumulates there.

There is a reason the discussion of method leans towards appearance or towards enemies. Both show a result on the day you start. Fix three colours and you can see that something was fixed; draw a line and you can see that a line was drawn. The order shows nothing on the day it is settled. It appears afterwards, when a collision occurs and one side is chosen.

This is not a matter only for people about to build one. Where three colours were fixed, templates were built, and years have been spent keeping to them, the same single point still applies. Consistency of surface and visibility of order are achieved separately. A state in which only the surface is consistent looks finished from outside, so no information ever comes back to say that something is missing.

How to make the appearance itself is not treated here. Which three colours, how to shoot the photographs — these can only be settled after the basis for choosing has been settled. What is treated here is that basis.

Order shows not in what was chosen but on the side of what was not. Where both can be held at once, which one is weighted more cannot be read from outside. It can be read only where the two cannot both stand and one of them is dropped. So a worldview rises not from a matched surface but from the record of what was let go.

What the Methods on Offer Are Trying to Make Consistent

The procedure offered for building a worldview divides, broadly, into three stages.

First there is a stage of putting the impression into words. Colour, light, texture, atmosphere. The world you want to express is written out in such terms.

Second, a stage of fixing the visual elements. Decide three colours — primary, secondary and accent — prepare several image templates, and thereafter work within that range.

Third, the stage of operating it. Keep to the templates decided. Keeping to them makes each individual post recognisable as coming from the same source.

All three stages function in practice. The effect of the third in particular is large: with templates in place, publishing itself continues more easily, because there is no need to build from nothing each time. Continuation carries value in itself.

The other direction — placing a common enemy — belongs here at the same level. The procedure is simple: put one boundary between inside and outside before anything else. Industry convention, the old way of doing things, a nameless general atmosphere. What goes on the outside is free to choose, and the moment it is placed, the inside is settled.

This works fast. An outline stands up in the fewest moves when something outside is pointed at. Explaining what kind of person you are takes several stages; what kind of person you are not carries in a single sentence. Anyone on the same side grasps at once where they are standing.

And this way of working has an expiry. For as long as the outline has the shape of the enemy, changing the enemy changes the outline. Let industry convention shift and the outline that opposed it stops being an outline. The inside moves by as much as the outside moved. So little accumulates here; each time, a new outside has to be found.

With that granted, what the two directions handle can be drawn out. Colour, texture, template, arrangement — and the object placed on the outside. Every one is either a property of the surface that meets the receiver’s eye, or a contrast reflected on that surface.

What happens when the properties of the surface are made consistent? The information that this came from the same source carries before the content is read. This lowers the load of processing, because before reading it is clear that this is from somewhere known.

This effect is real and should not be treated lightly. Publishing with an inconsistent surface flows past without being recognised as coming from the same person. Unrecognised, it does not accumulate however good the content. Identification is a precondition of accumulation.

A side effect shows up here: it looks finished once it is consistent. Three colours are fixed, templates exist, and laid out together it looks tidy. The work reaches a natural break here. Yet what has carried at this point is only the information that the source is the same. Hardly anything about what is held to be important has carried.

The reason for this appearance is that work on the surface arrives at completion in a visible form. The three colours were fixed, the templates were made, they were checked side by side. The end of the work is clear.

The work of putting into words what is held to be important, by contrast, has no clear end. Write, apply, find the coarseness, rewrite. There is no method for judging from outside when it finished.

Where work with a visible end sits beside work without one, the former tends to be started first. And when the former finishes, a sense of a break is produced. A sense of a break has the power to postpone starting the latter. That most self-reports of having built a worldview point at surface consistency is the consequence of this order.

What a Consistent Appearance Produces Is Identification, Not Preference

Identification and preference are different functions. Identification judges whose is this. Preference judges do I choose this. The former holding does not make the latter hold automatically.

Everyday shopping makes this clear. You see a logo and know instantly whose it is. There are still countless products you do not buy. Identification holds completely and preference does not.

Where, then, does preference come from? From whether that product answers to what is important to you. And what is important to you stands up distinctly when it overlaps with the order of importance the sender has presented.

An objection arises here: surely a preference in appearance becomes a preference directly; buying at the shop whose design one likes is a real behaviour.

That is right, as far as it goes. What is at work there, however, is not the appearance itself. The appearance is being read as an indicator of something.

A carefully made surface is read as an indicator of care. A restrained palette is read as an indicator of restraint. What is being read is the judgement behind the surface. And where the judgement is consistent, the surface is consistent. Reverse the order — make only the surface consistent while the judgements scatter — and the dislocation is exposed after a while.

Surface design can be outsourced. Colours and templates come out tidy if a specialist is asked. Yet a surface tidied by outsourcing on a brief about mood alone does not reflect the arrangement of that business’s judgements. A surface that does not reflect them tends to diverge from the content the more the content grows.

The divergence shows in details. A calm surface while the text is inflammatory. A careful texture while refusals are handled roughly. The receiver judges which is the substance. And what gets taken as the substance is usually not the surface.

This is not to say outsourcing should be avoided. Surface design requires specialist skill. Amateur handiwork is not so superior that doing it yourself can be recommended.

The dividing line is what is handed over in the outsourcing. Hand over only the instruction make it feel calm and what comes back is a surface that looks calm in general. Nobody’s judgement is reflected in it. Hand over material of the form in situations like this, this is the side taken; that judgement is what should show in the surface, and what comes back changes.

The quality of outsourcing, in other words, depends heavily on whether the material handed over contains an order. Where it does not, however skilled the party asked, what comes out tends to be a general solution. And a general solution resembles somebody else’s surface.

What “the Order of Importance” Concretely Points At

The order spoken of here is the arrangement of which is satisfied first when several things are demanded in the same situation.

An example. In some piece of work, the deadline and the accuracy cannot both be met. Which is satisfied first? An order appears here, because choosing one is placing the other behind.

Another example. Revenue and declining cannot both be met. A request that does not fit the criteria arrives, and taking it would make a figure. An order appears here too.

An order does not appear in situations where both hold. If both the deadline and the accuracy can be met, what is held to be important remains unknown. Only in situations of collision does an order become observable.

This decides the character of the work of conveying a worldview. A worldview carries poorly through declaration alone. The sentence this business places weight on accuracy is a statement made in a situation of no collision, and contains no information about order.

What carries is the description of a situation where a collision occurred. In what circumstances, what collided with what, which was taken, and what was lost as a result. Only when this much is written can the order be read.

There is no need to publish every collision. Where another party is involved, much cannot be written.

What is needed is consistency, not quantity. One description from which the order can be plainly read allows other situations to be inferred from it. Conversely, twenty declarations with no description of a collision leave the order beyond inference.

One more note on the word order. An order is not a ranking of value.

Placing accuracy before the deadline is not the claim that the deadline has no value. Both have value, and situations really exist in which they cannot both be met — that is why an order is required. Were one of them without value, no collision would arise in the first place.

This distinction affects how things carry. Spoken of as a ranking, what is placed behind is read as being slighted. Someone who weighs deadlines then receives it as a negation. Spoken of as an order, no negation is contained. Both matter, but where they collide this is the side taken is a form that does not negate the other party’s order of importance.

Speaking of order as ranking makes enemies of people who do not hold the same order. As business design, these are unnecessary enemies. An order is put out in order to reach those it fits, not in order to negate those it does not.

An Order Appears Through What You Do Not Handle

An order cannot be known by looking only at the side chosen. It becomes information only as a set with the side not chosen.

Translated into the context of publishing, this becomes: what you are not writing about conveys the order more than what you are.

Where ten people handle the same territory and all handle the same topics, the topics tell you nothing. Suppose one of them alone does not handle a topic that would obviously be handled in that territory. The fact of not handling it becomes information about the order.

Is carrying something by not handling it expecting too much of the receiver — will it not simply go unnoticed? The question is fair.

Once, it tends to go unnoticed. An absence takes shape only through repetition. Not touching something once is chance; not touching it twenty times is a judgement.

This method therefore takes time. And that property of taking time is, directly, resistance to imitation. Surface design can be copied in a day; twenty absences require twenty occasions’ worth of time.

Moreover, the imitator cannot tell what there is to copy, because an absence cannot be observed as a thing that is there. Only by reading all the output, counting the topics handled and setting them against what would normally be handled in that territory does the absence become visible. Even seen, reproducing it requires repeating the same judgement the same number of times.

A territory you do not handle produces, directly, a band you do not reach. People searching for that topic become less likely to come.

This appears as a loss, though that loss cannot be counted separately. Those who would have come had it been handled are mixed, in the totals, with those who did not come for other reasons. Since they cannot be told apart, an asymmetry arises: only the felt cost of fewer people coming remains, while the effect of the judgement not to handle it is hard to see.

It is not that not handling anything at all conveys an order. A territory simply not handled and a territory not handled as a judgement look the same from outside.

The distinction arises when the judgement not to handle it is put into words once. Write this topic is not handled here once, and every subsequent absence tends to be read as a judgement. Without writing it, the absence tends to be read as a mere shortfall.

Once is enough, however. Declare it repeatedly and the centre of gravity of the publishing shifts onto the very thing said not to be handled. Saying repeatedly that you do not handle something is almost the same as handling it. Place it once, then actually do not handle it. This form hands over the order in the fewest words.

A Worldview Working Means Entering the Selection of Attention

For a worldview to work is for it to enter the receiver’s selection of attention.

Arriving and rising into awareness are two separate events. Experiments that play different speech into the two ears and have one side shadowed aloud have long shown the split: the content of the unshadowed side cannot be reported afterwards (Cherry, 1953, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975–979). Yet in the same format, your own name was noticed by some participants even when it arrived on the side attention was not directed at (Moray, 1959, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11(1), 56–60).

That single point about the name is what carries the argument. Being able to detect the name means that side was being processed as well. Without processing, whether a name was contained there could not be judged. So input on the unattended side is processed to some degree, and what gets selected is which of it rises into awareness. At least in part, selection rather than blocking.

The working of a worldview lies on the side of that selection. Where the arrangement of what matters to the receiver overlaps with the arrangement you present, your output enters the side that is selected. Without overlap, it does not rise into awareness even though it arrives.

This overlap is not something you can operate from your side. The order on the other side was made through that person’s history. What you can do extends as far as placing your own order in a readable form.

This structure produces a non-linearity between volume of publishing and response. Against a band whose order does not overlap, increasing the volume does little to increase the response. Against a band that overlaps, even a small volume carries. Take volume as the indicator and this difference is invisible. This is why the response of increasing volume when there is no reaction so often swings at empty air.

One further consequence follows. There is a lag before an overlap arises.

The order on the other side moves along with that person’s situation. Someone who does not overlap now overlapping in six months happens quite ordinarily. The shape of their work changed, requests they could not decline piled up, they ran into trouble with pricing. Only then does output that had not been rising into awareness begin to rise.

Because of this lag, the effect of publishing cannot be measured at the point of publishing. The response in the week it went out is the response of those who already overlapped. The response of those who do not yet overlap appears months or years later.

That it cannot be measured does not mean it need not be. The measurable range — the response of the band that already overlaps — can be used to confirm whether the order has taken a readable form. What cannot be measured is the breadth of the reach. Look at the two through the same figure and even the judgement of breadth gets dragged along by short-horizon responses.

The Work of Putting It into Words Begins from Records of Judgement, Not from Description

The principle of implementation is not what should be done, but why it turns out as it does.

The work of putting an order into words is a different kind from the work of describing an impression. Quiet, with space, calm is description. No order comes out of description. Since all of them hold at once, no collision is contained.

What becomes material is records of judgement. There are three kinds.

First, requests declined and the reasons for it. An order is always at work in the act of declining. What collided with what, and which was placed behind.

Second, situations where the way of working changed. It used to be done this way and from some point it changed. What came to be seen as important is contained in the reason for the change.

Third, a sense of wrongness at others’ ways of working. Something you felt no wish to adopt although it was succeeding. This is evidence of judging by something other than the result.

All three lie in the past. Rather than thinking something up anew, they are extracted from judgements already made. What is made by thinking diverges later from the actual judgements. What is extracted has not diverged from the start.

What if the past judgements are not consistent. That case has to be covered.

Not being consistent is the norm. And the inconsistent places are precisely the ones carrying information. In situations of the same kind, sometimes you declined and sometimes you accepted. Look at where that difference came from and the conditions under which the order swaps become clear.

A conditional order is more accurate than an unconditional one, because in cases like this, this side is taken is closer to actual judgement than always do this.

And the more accurate one has the greater effect when it carries, because an unconditional statement can be written by anyone. Businesses that can write this business places weight on accuracy are countless. Businesses that can write on work above a certain scale the deadline takes priority, and below it accuracy does, and here is why are limited to those that have actually made that judgement.

An extracted order can be unexpected to the person themselves.

What was thought important is placed behind in the record of judgements. Conversely, what was never conscious is repeatedly prioritised. This discrepancy is usually processed in the direction of correcting the record. The record gets corrected, in the form what it really ought to be is this.

Correct it and the extraction loses its point. That what came out differs from the ideal is a sign that the extraction worked. If only what matches the ideal comes out, it is closer to composition than extraction.

Consistency Is Not the Goal but a By-Product of Order

Once the order is settled, the surface tends to become consistent. The reverse hardly holds.

The reason is that choices about the surface are also judgements. Which colour to use, how much space to leave, which words to choose. All of them reflect what is seen as important. With the order settled, each judgement leans in the same direction. It tends to become consistent without any attempt at consistency.

Make only the surface consistent while the order is unsettled and consistency has to be achieved as rules. Rules can be kept, but outside the rules — a new format of publishing, a situation not anticipated — judgement is hard to make. The dislocation shows there.

This is not to say rules are unnecessary. Where several people operate something, without rules there is no consistency. A rule is an order translated into a form executable by someone who does not hold the order. As a translation it is effective.

The problem shows up when the translation gets used in place of the original. With nothing but rules, when something the rules did not anticipate arrives, judgement either stops there or goes wrong.

When the surface is tidied first, coarseness in the content becomes hard to see. A sentence placed on a tidy surface looks tidy — to the reader, and to the writer.

This invisibility reduces the occasions for correction. Since coarseness raises no sense of wrongness, it persists. With the order settled first, the sense of wrongness arises on the side of the content. That it arises is a state in which correction is working.

The surface has one further property when the order is settled. The manner of consistency differs from consistency achieved by rules.

Make it consistent by rules and the range of consistency is sharply bounded. Inside the range it is tidy; outside it is unrelated. Consistent through order, the range has no boundary. Even in a new format of publishing, even in a first-time situation, things lean in the same direction, because the source of the judgement is the same.

This difference tells when scaling up. Increase the kinds of output, the formats handled, the people involved. Where consistency runs on rules, each increase means writing more rules. Where the writing cannot keep pace, consistency breaks. Where consistency runs on order, increasing does not change the source.

Where people are added, order alone is not enough. Moving an order into another person requires sharing the records of judgement, and that takes time. Rules are the instrument for achieving consistency without waiting out that time. Used as an instrument for buying time, rules work well.

Once the Order Becomes Visible, Some People Stop Coming

What tends to be observed first when a worldview stands up is a decrease.

The reason is that once the order can be read, those it does not fit are told that it does not fit. Told, they leave. Leaving is also a sign that it carried.

This phenomenon, though, appears in the same form as failure: the number drops. Whether it dropped through poor content or through the order having carried cannot be known by looking at the number alone.

Telling them apart is done with what remains. Has the way conversations open changed? Can the explanation of premises be omitted? Have you stopped being asked to confirm the same things repeatedly? If these are occurring, the order has carried.

Welcoming a decrease can look irresponsible as business.

Nobody is told to welcome it. What is written is that a structure producing the decrease exists. The distinction matters. Meet the decrease without knowing the structure and you locate the cause in the quality of the publishing, and adjust in the direction of diluting the order. Dilute it and the decrease stops. And you return to a state of having identification alone.

At a stage when transactions to hand are few, this decrease cannot be absorbed. Putting the order out strongly in a period when it cannot be absorbed comes back not as a problem of order but as a problem of cash flow.

An order is not a choice between putting the values out and not; it carries a width of how far to put them out. Only someone watching the state of things to hand can adjust that width. What can be handed over here is the single point that the cost of narrowing the width appears in the form of identification alone remaining.

The composition of the decrease has one further layer. The ones who visibly leave are only the ones who were already coming.

Once the order becomes readable, the part of the incoming population that does not fit stops arriving as well. That part never enters the attrition record. Since there was no contact to begin with, the record looks identical to nothing having happened.

So an observable decrease always comes out smaller than the real one. When estimating, do not take the visible count at face value; work on the assumption that there is an invisible side to it.

This structure strengthens the hesitation to put an order out, because what is lost appears as a concrete face and what is gained appears as a statistical future. Set the concrete next to the abstract and the concrete always weighs more. That difference in weight is not correct as material for judgement. The heavier feel, though, cannot be avoided.

Where You Can Confirm That the Worldview Is Working

Whether it carried across is not read off the goodness of the impression.

The first indicator is how you are referred on. When someone explains you to a third party, what do they say? Explained by job title or sector, you remain at the step of identification. Explained in the form someone who thinks like this, the order has carried.

The second indicator is the quantity of what is already settled before they arrive. In the first exchange, what no longer needs explaining? If you no longer have to begin from sharing premises, those premises have carried through the publishing. The quantity of explanation omitted is a good gauge of the quantity transmitted.

The third indicator is the point at which an ill-fitting party leaves of their own accord. Where the order has not carried, the misfit becomes clear after the transaction begins. Where it has, it is clear before it begins. If the point of departure has moved earlier, it is working.

Every one of the three looks not at what you put out but at what was omitted on the other party’s side.

This form was chosen because whether a worldview is working is decided by whether it has carried across. Where it has, processing on the other party’s side becomes lighter. Explanation is not required, judgement is quicker, checks decrease. However much lighter it became is how much carried across.

What can be observed on your own side, meanwhile, is how much you put out. The number of posts, the characters written, the surfaces tidied. The quantity put out and the quantity carried across are not proportional. Watch only the former and quantity piles up in a state of nothing carrying.

How many months until the manner of referral changes, how far narrowing is enough. Nothing is fixed here as a number. These change entirely in meaning with the territory handled and the state of things currently to hand. Fixing one would mean settling the allocation without looking at those conditions at all.

In its place stands the description that a worldview is the state in which an order of importance is visible from outside; the structure by which an order appears through situations of collision and through territory not handled; and the indicator that a carried order shows itself in how you are referred on. With these three understood, whether your own publishing is at the step of identification or the step of preference is something you can read for yourself.

The procedure for the work of putting an order into words is handled in How to make a concept. And how that order is reflected in price is taken apart in Do not begin pricing from cost.

The order covered here is part of one continuous structure — which side the source of value is placed on. The whole map sits in Stepping down from price competition.