Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

Rory Sutherland is a vice president at Ogilvy in the UK. His YouTube videos advertise and promote the powers of myth, emotion, creativity, and passion. He tells good stories. He nods to reason, logic, and rationality because those are the proof of known, workable solutions. Sutherland’s thesis is that if we have a problem now it must be logic-proof or it would already have been solved and would not now exist. 

This is my summary. I recommend that you watch the video for yourself with CC:Closed Captions on. 

Rory Sutherland’s 10 Rules of Alchemy

1. The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. When we narrow down all options to the single rational choice, if it fails, no one can be blamed because they followed the data and the model. In fact, problems often have multiple solutions, different alternatives for other people whose values are not our own. 
2. Do not design for the average. Look for the extreme. The average person will reject the unknown until other people make it a trend. Go for those other people.
3. It does not pay to be logical when everyone else is logical. To overcome your competition in the market, find the errors in their models and meet those needs. He points out that every military seeks to design and implement surprises. 
4. The nature of our intentions is the source of our internal tensions. His example is extreme though telling. His best hotel experience was in an East Berlin pad that must have been a police cell. If you were looking for a Ramada Inn you were going to be disappointed, but he wanted the experience of an East Berlin vacation and he was ecstatic. Know your true intentions and it will minimize your emotional tensions.
5. A flower is just a weed with an advertising budget. Nature rewards and invests in reproductive strategies that are effective, even when seemingly inefficient. 
6.  Logic kills off magic. The payoff for magic is the change in perception. Apple changed the perception of the computer. 
7. A good guess plus empirical observation is still science. You can have a lucky guess and be right. **See below.
8. Test the counter-intuitive things because nobody else will. Businesses must mainly follow the rational and logical and the data-driven because that is what is known to work. You still must set aside space—I take that to mean organizational as well as physical—to test random journeys.
9. Rationality is a tool. If it is your only tool, then you are playing golf with just one club.
10. Dare to be trivial. The butterfly effect is that a small change can have a large consequence. Add one sentence to the script of a call center and see what change it brings. 
11. Do not limit yourself to ten rules. Rational people are everyone else. So, if there is a problem not solved now, it is logic-proof or would not exist. Be creative.
12. Dare to look stupid. “Why do people dislike standing up on trains?” In fact, some prefer it for a moderate ride of 20 to 30 minutes because they have been sitting in a chair all day. If you notice, some people still stand even after sufficient seats have been vacated. For others, it might be the physical challenge of juggling one’s kit after you are already latched on to a pole. Ultimately, now we have privileged window seating perhaps with a tray or armrest and so on, and with others forced to stand in the middle with not much to do. He asks, what if, instead, we had rows of seats in the middle with the spaces near windows specially designed for restful standing, perhaps with cellphone chargers as well. Now, it looks different.
13. Create net utility with a multivariate choice. Give people choices that optimize or minimize more than one variable and in disproportion so that whatever the outcome for the individual, you bring less regret. This is adaptive preference formation, a narrative for the support of choices.

** (Rory Sutherland cites Paul Feyerabend in asserting that advances in science have not come from applications of the scientific method but from intuition and insight. What the postmodernists ignore and would have us ignore in their program against reason is that you can only prove that your intuitive insight is truly scientific by following the scientific method so that you first and then others can test and replicate your work. Otherwise, you have nothing. The flash of insight and awareness can only be a reward for the rational, logical, empirical, experiential modes of learning as the preparation for better understanding and, ultimately, therefore, material abundance.) 

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