Rory Sutherland | Books that make you think differently

you should read good detective fiction because it teaches you a lot about how to have an Insight book number one would be the complete works of Arthur conand Doyle specifically the Sherlock Holmes short stories in fact and for several reasons I mean first of all uh although he's not considered a serious figure in literature uh doy is an absolutely masterful Pros writer so if you want to learn to work to write clearly and to think clearly as a consequence of writing clearly it's a fantastic example a few Literati like kings Le Amis for example did

actually point to the fact that many people from that era uh you know if you think about it it's kind of late Victorian Edwardian era are painful to read to Modern English readers he's not there's a bigger reason which is that you should read good detective fiction because it teaches you a lot about how to have an Insight I think there are very interesting kind of parallels between creative work if you like of any kind detective work and perhaps humor would be a third would be a third characteristic all three of them possess some really

useful kind of they're almost sort of practice runs for having a use useful Insight in a commercial sense uh you know there's the comedic skill of spotting something that nobody else has spotted and that also occurs in crime fiction um and it also teaches you that actually surprisingly trivial things anecdotal things tiny little anomalies can be of huge importance one of the worst things I think you can have as a detective and one of the worst things I think you can have in um in our own business is a is a sense of proportion in

other words if you're the kind of person who gets really really annoyed if people start talking about small things or anecdotes or anomalies or outliers because you want to focus on the average okay um you're the wrong kind of person for this job and so actually if you don't want to read those read any kind of crime fiction or read true life crime or watch YouTube documentaries on how they catch serial killers it doesn't really matter but I think there's something quite important there which is that if you look at good police work it starts

out with um an investigative phase now eventually you have to prove your case in court but there's an investigative phase which precedes the evidential phase now in the investigative phase you may make use of did anybody notice anything unusual The Peculiar incident of the dog in the nighttime that's from a Sherlock Holmes short story called uh the adventure of Silver Blaze uh the point was the dog didn't do anything in the nighttime which was the peculiar incident and it suggested that the crime with spoiler alert was an Insight job but because if anybody had broken

into the Stables to steal the race horse the dog would have been expected to bark or make some sort of noise and you know that's a beautiful example of spotting an asymmetric Insight the absence of something rather than the presence of something and so you know in any case get involved in crime because it's enjoyable um and it's an enjoyable way to understand the process now ultimately this is where I think we get it wrong we want to start with the data and we want to start with things with evidential value we want to start

with hard facts if you're trying to find out an ultimate truth you won't be presented with that data to begin with you have to go and find it and quite often the thing that leads to the capture of a major criminal is a surprisingly trivial seeming chance observation so the Yorkshire Ripper famously well I mean Son of Sam was caught I think because he got a parking ticket um and somebody remembered seeing a traffic Warden and they just wondered whether the perpetrator might have given been given a parking ticket sure enough he had been and

they went along to check on him and before they went into to question him they looked in the car and they basically saw a load of guns and loony notes in the back of the car they thought Okay this may not be a completely wasted visit here in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper two of the cops one of the decisive moments was they spotted that he parked his car the the wrong way round and this is because in the Bradford red light district apparently not a habitu um people normally park with their wind screen

facing the wall so nobody can see what's back going on in the back seat uh in his case he' parked the other way around as if to make a quick getaway which was indeed what he was planning and they remembered this fact and they went back and investigated and sure enough found that he dropped a a hammer and a screwdriver uh in the bushes while he was urinating um just before they arrested him and now that's evidential now okay but actually you've got to go through a kind of Mount uncertainty and you've also got to

in you've got to avoid becoming fixated on a few particular data points because they may not be true the other case with the Yorkshire was they were convinced he had a Jordy accent because someone was sending in fake tape recordings and actually you have to be prepared to let go of certain things in this process of Investigation as I said I'm not against data I'm not against evidence you can't bang someone up for 40 years for parking in a funny way okay but those little things they don't give you solid proof that you're right but

they tell you what to investigate next and where to direct your attention next next book I'd recommend would be obvious Adams by Robert igraph which is a book of about 60 Pages which you can read in a single sitting uh it was published in something like 1914 or 16 or something and it's uh subtitled um obvious Adams the story of a successful businessman actually detail someone who works in advertising funly enough but he doesn't actually do any advertising he his value to the business Community is again in noticing things um in a sense um when

I was given this book I was just appointed as OG's creative director and I was given a copy by Mike Walsh who was the chairman of ogleby Europe at the time and I was a bit insulted because it looked like a hokey kind of American Business self-help book which is exactly what it is by the way but it's still in print and for a very very good reason which is that it's a very very good guide to creativity through observation and um it was funny enough one of David OG's favorite books I didn't realize that

that's probably why Mike Walsh gave it to me I was kind of insulted because I thought you know I've just been made creative director you should be giv me a subscription to the Harvard Business review or The Economist and instead you've got me this hokey Edwardian Business book and I kind of put it on the shelves in a bit of a half until I think possibly for a trip to the L I just grabbed it one day and started reading it and indeed for the first two pages I thought this is a hokey Business book

but by the time I'd finished I realized it was brilliant there are moments of epiphany um and I the the problem I have in recommending a a Behavioral Science book is that I can't remember entirely where which one led to my Epiphany there was a very good one by a guy called I think Pete Lun if I'm right which might have been the first one I read um let me go and uh research this actually uh he's I think he's an Irish or or maybe a British behavioral scientist resident in Ireland and um uh there's

also a book there's a book by someone called Stuart Southerland called irrationality which was very good um but I can't recommend him because he's a fairly member of the southernland family he's no relation by the way I got a vague idea that Pete Pete uh Pete L's book was called Basic Instincts human nature and the new economics and that might have been the first book I read that actually gave me the kind of wow this is really fascinating I I've got a vague memory I was Ill that I was Ill with flu for about a

week I started reading some very good economics books and I read various um uh there's the armchair Economist by a guy called Steven Landsburg and I fundamentally had a kind of reading binge because with the flu I wasn't well enough to do anything else and I found it um absolutely fascinating so that's Pete Lun who I think probably deserves a plug for that book so I'll make that number three um it sits with an awful lot of Behavioral economics books but the reason I the reason I give it quite a lot of prominences I think

it was the first one I read and that was the one which was in a sense decisive in my thinking because it suggested it was the first time I'd been introduced to behavioral economics with a suggestion that actually as I'd always suspected I was fascinated by economics because it was such an elegant Theory but I'd also worked in advertising long enough to know that it made ludicrous assumptions about human motivation um symmetry of information perfect trust you know the stuff okay I was also I also knew enough about reality to know that these were not

safe assumptions to make in any kind of real world setting outside the model um they struck me as just almost irresponsible now nonetheless I found you know the whole thing extremely elegant um you know economics and it is elegant and by the way sometimes it's useful there are occasions where it's very useful but the idea that it's necessarily the best idea you can have is the one that makes the most economic sense strikes me as fundamentally dangerous and wrong-headed and then the F the fourth book I will go on to the fourth book the fourth

book is I'm going to be anomalous here and it's actually and I don't expect everybody to take it out up um there is oh Cy it is say a book of times or Telegraph cryptic crosswords um it could be Sudoku if you really hate cryptic crosswords or in America they don't really have cryptic crosswords they have them in Canada Australia New Zealand they exist in Hebrew and in Polish I think but they're very big in India in fact the times of India has a very very good cryptic crossword but they don't seem to exist in

the United States so apologies for you uh if there are any American listeners but it's very interesting because it's yet it effectively teaches you quite a lot about creative Insight generation which I suppose is sort of the gig I'm in at the moment many of us are and partly because the clue always has an ostensible surface meaning which is a distraction reading the sentence literally will not help you solve that um clue okay what you have to do is break it up unusually into one part of the clue which is a h homonym or simony

for what the answer is and the other part which defines it cryptically so that for example in a crossword clue you might read the word does now you immediately read that as does okay and all everything in your brain is saying it's does okay now the actual answer to that is dear because D OE s in that particular context means Do's the plural of do a dear a female dear so that's the cryptic part of the of the thing which and effectively it's like an equation so the first half is effectively the definition of the

word that's that's the answer and the second one is the cryptic constituency of that particular word and um the reason I think this is so useful is for several reasons one of which is it teaches you to continually if you like reframe the question it's a very very good exercise in saying well we've been asked to do this but does it really mean this or actually why are we really doing this it's a bit like the Dominic cumming's recommendation to ask why six times when somebody says we're going to you know reduced train unpunctuality across

the southern region you don't just go yeah great idea you go why and then you go why again and only after about five or six whys do you get actually close to the real reason and then you can debate whether it's actually a good idea or not and so it's that business of seeing beneath the surface I do I do a cryptic cross word probably every day I try to but there's another thing about it too and this is equally important which is what it teaches you about the best way to approach problems for example

this is just one example very commonly you will be completely baffled by a clue to a point of just complete bamboozlement and you'll go away make a cup of tea distract yourself go and do something else and you'll come back and the answer is apparent within 5 seconds so it teaches you one of the things which I think is a creative tip which is in a weird way you think the way to solve a problem because we've been taught this is the kind of worthy proest way to solve a problem is to apply yourself very

very diligently to the problem but actually with crossword solving it's the art of distracting yourself that actually if you're stuck the very thing you should not do is persevere and so there's a very particular kind of mindset which loves to start work early start work straight away keep on plowing on in the same direction no kind of recursion no deviation um just stick focused on the task and do not let up keep your mind nose to the grindstone okay which seems like a very moral and correct efficient approach and won't get you into any trouble

at work but it's actually a very very bad behavior if you're trying to solve a problem imaginatively or indeed you know effect really effectively because there there are two parts of life okay there's what there's the literal part part of life where what makes sense is also what make makes most sense is most likely to work and there are areas of engineering and physics and chemistry and so on which effectively fulfill those requirements and then there's a large part of life where actually what works and what makes sense may be quite Divergent the thing that

makes the most sense may not work all that well and the problem with those areas of life is that if you pretend that second class of problem belongs to the first class of problem and you basically act as though this is a quest for um you know a rational solution to the problem um based simply B on sequential logic you will look like a really good person dedicated to solving the problem you'll never get CR I think an awful lot of protest uh is actually counterproductive all right you think you're signaling that you care about

the problem Act actually in many ways what you're doing may be losing support for your case okay and so what I think is vital about cryptic crosswords is it's a very good exploration both into the um into the H I suppose you say the habits of thought that you need in order to crack problems where the literal approach is effectively likely to fail in fact the worst thing you can do with a cryptic crossword is read it read it literally because and of course it's very it's very interesting with market research because it's the whole

question of kind of okay this is what they're ostensibly saying this is what they really mean you know it's that kind of thing I mean an interesting one if you want the modern version of obvious Adams and you end actually with a film recommendation which is the big short and the reason I recommend that film is because of course there were lots and lots of people who had lots and lots of selfs serving theories about collateralized debt obligations and you know synthetic cdos and whatever okay what distinguished not all but most of the most of

the team is they went to they went and looked they went to Florida and looked at what was really happening in the housing market and you know they went to Vegas and they looked at the extraordinary kind of over abulance of the people involved in the business and they realized there was a floor but they noticed things that other people didn't notice or didn't want to see [Music]