Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #19 Rory Sutherland

I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and my work, in particular.

Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of them are old. Some of them are business leaders, some thought leaders, some sportsmen and some coaches. Some of them are artists and some spiritual leaders.

However, if we look deeply, all of them are like you and me, ordinary people who’ve had an extra-ordinary impact on me and potentially a lot of others. And once you get to know them, may be they will have a similar impact on you as well or maybe not, only time will tell.

The reason I am putting together this list and share what I have learnt from them, to thank them publicly for being a teacher and teaching me important lessons in life and in the hope that some of you might be inspired by their company and they can impact you and your life as they have impacted mine.

So, let’s get started.

19. Rory Sutherland

Rory is a British advertising executive, vice-chairman of the Ogilvy Group. He is an author with multiple best selling books to his name.

One of the things that I have learnt from him is the following: When we are trying to solve a problem, it is as important to look at the problem from an emotional perspective as it is to look at it from a logical perspective.

The perspective we take influences how we solve the problem. If we look at the problem as an engineer, we come up with an engineering solution; if we look at the problem like an advertiser or a designer, we come up with a solution that could be completely different from the engineering solution.

While we may continue to solve the problems the way we have always did, but having this different perspectives and different solutions gives us the ability to reimagine the solutions as and when we need. This is like any other muscle that we can exercise and develop ahead of time, so that we are ready when we need to flex it.

Based on what I learnt from him, I came up with the acronym PPT to solve any complex problem or to drive transformation using technology.

P – Psychology

Before deploying technology or investing in new infrastructure / solutions, explore if you can solve the problem by employing creativity and deploying human psychology. Is there are an emotional angle to the problem? Can you shift this emotion by deploying an insight that eliminates the problem itself?

An example of this kind of thinking: When people complained that elevators were too slow, instead of replacing existing elevators with express elevators (logical or engineering solution), they instead installed mirrors near and inside elevators. The insight deployed here was that people got busy in looking at themselves that they forgot that the elevators were slow.

P – Processes

If you are unable to solve the problem using insight and psychology, look at the processes and see if you can change either the sequence or the components of the process that is causing the problem you are trying to solve. Then change the process or its components such that the problem is either eliminated, automated or it becomes redundant.

An example of this kind of thinking: When a finance department found itself overwhelmed by need to process huge swathes of incoming invoices (from vendors), they decided to implement a trust based process to eliminate a significant number of invoices to be processes.

Any invoice that exactly matched the PO that it was based on, and was below a certain threshold, would automatically be paid out without anyone having to look at it. Now, the finance team only looked at exceptions to this rule and therefore significantly freeing up their time and attention.

T – Technology

Only when the earlier two methods failed to solve the problem should one look at deploying significant investments (either in the form of technology or infrastructure or new projects).

Even when deploying new technology, it is imperative to look if we can still use Psychology or Process based solutions in tandem with the technology deployment to significantly increase the effectiveness of the solution.

You can find all his books here.

Some of his talks that I found insightful and inspiring: