Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Now, I accept that the need to solve ‘narrow context’ problems is much greater today than it was a million years ago, and there’s no denying the contribution that rational approaches have made to our lives – in fields such as engineering, physics and chemistry. But I would also contend that our environment has not changed all that much: most big human problems, and the majority of business decisions, are still ‘wide context’ problems. The problems occur when people try to solve ‘wide’ problems using ‘narrow’ thinking. Keynes once said, ‘It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’, and evolution seems to be on his side. The risk with the growing use of cheap computational power is that it encourages us to take a simple, mathematically expressible part of a complicated question, solve it to a high degree of mathematical precision, and assume we have solved the whole problem. So my GPS answers a narrow question like ‘How long will it take to drive to Gatwick?’ brilliantly, but the wider questions like ‘How should I get there and when should I set off?’ still remain. The GPS device has provided a brilliant answer to the wrong question. In the same way, companies can, for instance, optimise their digital advertising spend to a huge degree of precision, but this does not necessarily mean that they have answered the wider marketing questions, such as ‘Why should people trust me enough to buy what I sell?’