Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense

The Jolly Contrarian turns cultural critic Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Reviews Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Rory Sutherland’s ten rules, and how these translate into the JC’s messed up, post-structuralist view.

• The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea: The idea that there even is a single right answer, let alone that you know it, hails from a profoundly deterministic, reductionist world view. If you subscribe to this view, and you believe you have the right answer, then any other answer is necessarily sub-optimal, therefore wrong, and therefore you are objectively justified in suppressing it. The benign view (which Sutherland takes) is the “no-one got fired for hiring IBM” approach: I took the correct, rational path, I was objective, so I cannot be blamed should things go wrong. (By the way, isn’t that a depressing, negative, glass-almost-empty disposition to take to your work? We are but actors, all the world’s a stage, we are but frozen in the starlight and determined by events; we cannot influence outcomes, so my dearest aspiration is not to be blamed? Especially since, if you adopt this view, no-one can be blamed for anything anyway since the outcome of the universe in every particular was set in stone from the original singularity?

It is not more rewarding to think that you not only can influence outcomes, but this is your sacred quest?

• Don’t design for average: