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The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.
Dare to be trivial.
Unfortunately, because reductionist logic has proved so reliable in the physical sciences, we now believe it must be applicable everywhere – even in the much messier field of human affairs. The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic – a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.
the left-brain, logical model of the world, productivity is proportional to hours worked, and a doubling of holiday time must lead to a corresponding 4 per cent fall in salary.
We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.
entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee.
When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic.
economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers,
Introduction: Cracking the (Human) Code
Logic is bad for ideation but for exploring the idea a rational, logical methodology is critical.
The ‘rational’ envelope in fact reduces donations by over 30 per cent compared to the plain control, while the other three tests increase donations by over 10 per cent.
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
Modern consumerism is the best-funded social science experiment in the world, the Galapagos Islands of human weirdness.
Human behaviour is an enigma. Learn to crack the code.
Learning how to disentangle the literal from the lateral meaning is essential to solving cryptic crosswords, and it is also essential to understanding human behaviour.
the tools which work so well when designing a Boeing 787, say, will not work so well when designing a customer experience or a tax programme. People are not nearly as pliable or predictable as carbon fibre or metal alloys, and we should not pretend that they are.
There is hence an ever-present temptation to pretend things are more ‘logical’ than they really are.
This book is intended as a provocation, and is only accidentally a work of philosophy.
Rather than being designed to be optimal, it has evolved to be useful.
Logic is what makes a successful engineer or mathematician, but psycho-logic is what has made us a successful breed of monkey, that has survived and flourished over time. This alternative logic emerges from a parallel operating system within the human mind, which often operates unconsciously, and is far more powerful and pervasive than you realise. Rather like gravity, it is a force that nobody noticed until someone put a name to it.
the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages.
It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past.
When I told one economist that you can often increase the sales of a product by increasing its price, the reaction was one not of curiosity but of anger. It was as though I had insulted his dog or his favourite football team.
Nobel Prize-winning behavioural scientist Richard Thaler said, ‘As a general rule the US Government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.’
There are many problems which are logic-proof, and which will never be solved by the kind of people who aspire to go to the World Economic Forum at Davos.* Remember
We could never have evolved to be rational – it makes you weak.
Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.
A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather.
Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
in an evolved or complex system, or in human behaviour, things can have multiple uses depending on the context within which they are viewed.
If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalisation is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat.
There are two separate forms of scientific enquiry – the discovery of what works and the explanation and understanding of why it works.
And what is the single most important finding of the advertising industry? Perhaps it is that ‘advertisements featuring cute animals tend to be more successful than ads that don’t’.
in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.*
Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.
Research later showed that individuals whose appendix had been removed were four times more likely to suffer from clostridium difficile colitis, an infection of the colon.
it seems that, rather like the Spanish royal family, most of the time it’s pointless or annoying, but sometimes it’s invaluable.*
The lesson we should learn from the appendix is that something can be valuable without necessarily being valuable all the time.
Church attendance is the most important predictor of marital stability and happiness.
Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.*
the single greatest strength of free markets is their ability to generate innovative things whose popularity makes no sense.
Once you accept that there may be a value or purpose to things that are hard to justify, you will naturally come to another conclusion: that it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.
in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start.* Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.
Context is that key to behavioral economics.
Scarcity and ubiquity can both matter, depending on the context.
While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work.
Smith articulation of this idea:
“for any great truth, its opposite is also true.”
People are highly contradictory. The situation or place in which we find ourselves may completely change our perception and judgement.
no big business idea makes sense at first.
The problem that bedevils organisations once they reach a certain size* is that narrow, conventional logic is the natural mode of thinking for the risk-averse bureaucrat or executive.
Loonshots
At Ogilvy, I founded a division that employs psychology graduates to look at behavioural change problems through a new lens. Our mantra is ‘Test counterintuitive things, because no one else ever does.’
If you are building a bridge or building a road, there is a definition of success that is independent of perception. Will it safely take the weight of X vehicles weighing Y kg and travelling at Z mph? Success can be defined entirely in terms of objective scientific units, with no allowance for human subjectivity.*
Part of the flaw of human “goal systems” and goals in general. SMART goals aren’t.
