Why we should put data to one side and turn things on their head...

??????Podcast recommendation #4 ???????

This is Rory Sutherland in conversation with Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton to promote his book, 'Alchemy: The Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense'.?At over 3.5 hours, I would say this is more of a half-day course in advertising than a podcast, and it's rich with content! Today's write up is a mash up of some of Sutherland's wisdom with a few of my own deductions and observations on what it means for PRs. It's particularly good on understanding the limitations of data, and encouraging us to be a bit more mischievous in our work…

??Creative people look for mechanisms which expand the possible solution set.

Sutherland notes that typically, once a person thinks that the eternal logic of their decision making process ticks the box, they don't stop and think, 'what if we do this backwards?' But? the job of the right hemisphere task (or the creative person) is to stop becoming overly fixated on X to the point of absurdity, and instead to say, 'let’s look at this in a wider context.'

???? My takeaway: In a PR and comms environment, people often look to 'the Creatives' as the idea-generating machine. But they are so much more than that. Involve them in your clients’ problems. They might surprise you.

??Metrics are great if you want to win an argument because they have the appearance of rationality, but the consequent effect is not always optimal.

In politics in particular, we have educated and selected people for their ability to win arguments. Winning arguments is bullsh*t because all you do is set up a very dubious premise that seems reasonable, and then you Jesuitically extract a logical train of consequences from that premise, arrive somewhere else with a big QED, and actually what you’ve done has the appearance of intelligence [but may well be flawed] because you haven't creatively explored the solutions first. ??

???? My takeaway: don't rush to back up the first solution you find with data until you have considered other potential solutions.

??We are highly practised?at reasoning forwards, but this is rarely the path to innovation.

We think that reasoning forward is perfectly scientific, and actually we are wrong.? This illusion has been strengthened by the profusion of data; we think there is so much data kicking around that we know everything we need to know and therefore that every right answer is in the data. ?

In many cases the only way we have innovated previously is by extrapolating from past successes when what we really need to do is a bit of abductive inference....or what Conan Doyle called ‘reasoning backwards’, ie. 'I found a dead body. What must the original conditions have been to lead to this corpse?’. Not 'if this happens, what will happen next?’. If you want to innovate, try to imagine a different reality.

???? My takeaway: trust your instincts. If the data is taking you somewhere that doesn't feel right, or even worse feels dull, then follow your gut and drop it. Experiment with some abductive inference. Imagine a different reality. Many clients are understandably inclined to sign off stuff that we have done before which they liked. Sometimes, but not always, it’s our job as the agency to challenge them to not take the well-trodden path.

??Tech dominance has limited us to doing only those things we can prove.

When Rubin asks Sutherland how advertising has changed over the course of his lifetime, Sutherland says it has become more difficult because there are more things that you can measure and as a consequence, you become limited to doing only those things that you can prove. There are a number of valuable things that advertising can do which you can’t measure or attribute to a specific communication, in particular long-term effects. As Sutherland says, 'we call it, the burden of proof, because proving things in advance is a massive pain in the arse!'.

???? My takeaway: Don't let data be the single determinant of which ideas you put forward to your client. In the absence of data, find other compelling ways to make the case to your clients for investing in an idea. If in doubt, quote Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb: 'Data is necessary but not sufficient.'

[A quick aside re Chesky's excellent interview on another great pod, Stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO . Chesky points out how almost every business is conceived intuitively. 'Maybe sometimes people have statistical insights and data, but when most people start, they have no customers and if you have no customers, you probably have no data...and so everything is started with intuition, insights and understanding. The problem is, as you get more successful you get more data, and as you get more data you get more reliant on the data, and as you get more reliant on the data you get more derivative and iterative.'

??There is a tendency in business life to be overly reductive.

Sometimes we concentrate on optimising the part, because the part is comprehensible and numerically quantifiable whereas the whole is too complex.?

Sutherland talks about 'The doorman fallacy' from?his book which goes something like this...

A consulting firm looks at a five-star hotel and defines the doorman as the person who simply opens the door, replaces him with a ￡25k automatic door solution and lays claim to the cost solution. Five years later the hotel has lost its most loyal customers, the rack rate has fallen off a cliff and vagrants are sleeping in the doorway. The consulting firm has overlooked the fact that a doorman isn't just about opening the door.... they hail cabs, recognise regular guests - which means a lot to them -, exchange gossip with other doormen about local risks, and help to maintain the status of the hotel.

This is a classic example of how tech likes to take a complex system, reduce it into component parts, thereby stripping out systemic complexity.?

???? My takeaway:? While Sutherland’s point here is? to caution against the risk of optimising for the moment, not the long term, it brings to mind budget conversations, where clients sometimes take an idea and break it down into its component parts due to budget limitations. 'Do we really need to pay an influencer?', 'we're not going to put any spend behind social', 'drop the radio day'. 'If the story is strong enough, people will hear about it anyway.' ... All of the component parts of the comms ecosystem need to work together to create that magical snowball effect.

??If you can't argue the opposite position to any view you hold, then you don’t really understand it.

You’ve doubtless spent ages working out the positives of your idea; now flip it around and look at it from the other point of view. Reverse the telescope. What are the negatives you could potentially remove?

???? My takeaway: It's always worth trying to pick your own idea apart before someone else does! Also, in an increasingly polarised world, this is a useful technique to try and understand someone else's perspective on any topic.

??Don’t underestimate the power of an anecdote (referring to something as 'anecdotal is absurd...)

Before Pfizer discovered Viagra, they were trying to create a heart treatment. One story goes that at the end of the trial, when they asked people to hand back the drugs they had left over, everyone said 'NO!' And someone from Pfizer was shrewd enough to say, 'well that has never happened before. We had better find out why.'

Sutherland is a big fan of anecdotes because whilst they are single data points that carry a lot of freight. He argues that this this is where science has a problem...?.it focuses on measuring the confidence with which you can assert something, rather than the importance of it. He also notes how creative people often - helpfully - lack a sense of proportion, because it’s the small things that matters.

???? My takeaway: don't be afraid to use an anecdote as your strategic insight or jumping off point when you are building an idea.

And finally, I can never resist analysing people's interview techniques with my media training hat on....

Whenever Sutherland wants to take back control of the conversation, he just says, - with his trademark enthusiasm and charm - “that’s very interesting” or “that’s fascinating!”. Maybe there is something in the name Rory as this is not dissimilar to Rory Stewart who just says “very good” in a jovial voice when he wants to shut down an argument..!