They Said It #3: Defying Logic Through Experimentation with Rory Sutherland

The best ideas don’t come from following the rules of logic, they come from bending, breaking and sometimes ignoring them entirely. Then you don't have to end up in the same place as everybody else.

‘They Said It’ is a series spotlighting lessons from unconventional management thinkers, offering innovation types mindset and strategies to stay subversive, opportunistic and ready to seize their ‘now or never’ moments.

It only took getting to the third in this series to come to Rory Sutherland. I’m surprised it took so long … 😂 … He’s perhaps still the most important, and in many ways, undervalued voice when it comes to strategy and innovation today. He’s far more than an ad man, and breaking free from rigid, purely logical thought processes.

The trouble with logic is that it always seems like a good idea at the time. It’s safe, reassuring and, almost dangerously, always defensible. Unless your boss is a raging lunatic, you are unlikely to ever really get fired for being logical. In fact, most of the time, it makes you look quite clever.

But here sits the problem, if logic were the answer to everything, every business would be a roaring success, every city would run like clockwork a…