Rory Sutherland: Alchemy
In his book Alchemy, the Ogilvy Vice Chairman, Rory Sutherland describes the surprising power of ideas that don’t make sense.
In the opening pages Rory lists 11 rules of Alchemy.
I’ll summarise them here in case anyone finds them useful.
The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea: In physics the opposite of a good idea is a bad idea. In psychology, opposites can both work. We value the scarce & the popular. We seek out expensive treats & bargains. We appreciate opulent & no frills experiences.
Don’t design for average: The Earl of Sandwich was an obsessive gambler & demanded food that could be eaten at the card table. Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. Averages focus you on the middle of the market but innovation happens at the extremes.
I doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical: Because it’s easier to be fired for being illogical than unimaginative, rationality dominates decision-making. As a result using logic is guaranteed to get you to exactly the same place as your competitors.
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience: Food tastes better when it comes with an evocative description. Our attention is directed & certain flavours accentuated. Ads can also work in this way, focussing attention in order to enhancing an experience.
A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget: To achieve their goal (pollination), flowers spend resources (energy) to produce advertising (petals & scents) to convince their audience (bees) they have a product (nectar) that is worth their attention.
The problem with logic is that it kills off magic: You can have too much irrationality, but also, too little. A strictly logical approach limits potential solutions to those reached through reasoning at the expense of better solutions reached through instinct & imagination.
A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is lucky accident: As in science, business leaps often come outside of a rational process. Entrepreneurs don’t have to defend their thinking so are free to experiment outside of industry’s rigorous but restrictive process.
Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will: There are logical problems such as how to build a bridge & there are psycho-logical ones such as whether or not to paint lines on it. Because the latter don’t follow conventional logic, we must test the counterintuitive.
Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club: By following a strictly rational approach you restrict the tools available to you. You can expand your tools by accepting the ambiguities & peculiarities of human psychology.
Dare to be trivial: We assume large effects are only obtained by large inputs. But the trivial can be just as powerful. When Best Buy enabled online shoppers to checkout without an account purchase completion increased 45% & netted an additional $15m per month.
If there were a logical answer we would have found it: Valuable discoveries don’t make sense at first. If they did they’d have been uncovered already. Ideas which are hated may be more powerful than those that are liked, the popular & obvious ideas have already been tried.
If you enjoyed Rory’s 11 rules of Alchemy, I’d highly recommend picking yourself up a copy of the book. This thread only starts to scratch the surface.
You can find it here.
Enjoy.