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

by Rory Sutherland

institutional setting.fn4 We approve reasonable things too quickly, while counterintuitive ideas are frequently treated with suspicion. Suggest cutting the price of a failing product, and your boringly rational suggestion will be approved without question, but suggest renaming it and you’ll be put through gruelling PowerPoint presentations, research groups, multivariate analysis and God knows what elsefn5 – and all because your idea isn’t conventionally logical. However, most valuable discoveries don’t make sense at first; if they did, somebody would have discovered them already. And ideas which people hate may be more powerful than those that people like, the popular and obvious ideas having all been tried already. We should test counterintuitive things – because no one else will.