Premise:
I have just started reading “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland and am already loving it. The first thing that he writes in the book are his Rules of Alchemy.
If you don’t read anything else in the book but read, understand and put in practice these rules, you would already see interesting progress in your projects.
So, lets look at these rules of alchemy:
The Opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea
I have personally experienced this multiple times. We see this in the marketplace often – we have winners in the extreme high price luxury segment of any product category and the extreme low price segment of the same product category.
Don’t design for Average
In every workshop that I have facilitated to help product owners or startup founders build a product or a service or look at potential innovation, I have always recommended that we need to solve for the extreme cases. It is much easier to make something more accessible than it is to make it more unique.
It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical
This advice sounds so trivial. However, it is so difficult to put in place. In my experience, in a business setting, it is easier to be logical rather than creative or non-sensical (as Rory talks about in the book). No one ever got fired for doing the logical thing.
However, trying something that goes against the prevailing logic and fail, requires a lot of courage or a culture that expects it, which is both, in my opinion, rarer than even common sense.
The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience
It is now known that the way our minds function is by predicting the environment that we expect in any given context and scan it to confirm if there is any anomaly. If there is none, our mind switches to auto mode. If we want to learn to pay attention, we need to slow down and look for and pay attention to these anomalies.
We can train our minds to do so. I have been seeking and sharing something that I find beautiful on my Instagram profile for the past 95 days, and now, I see beauty everywhere I go. My mind is trained to pay attention to everything around me and scan for beautiful things. I have started seeing things that I missed for years (walking the same path, that now I can see).
A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget
It naturally follows from the above that if we want to thrive as a business, we need to attract more customers and buyers. One of the best ways still to do so is to stand out among our peers for something unique and then advertise our presence to the customers and share how we can make their lives better.
The problem with logic is that it kills off magic
Magic that Rory refers to here is the non logical and creative solution to any problem worth solving. Redbull is an example of magic in play. When it was tested with customers, it got some very negative responses, to say the least. However, today, it rivals water and Coke, when it comes to the beverages that we consume as a species.
A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So, is a lucky accident
Almost every single bias that behavioral economists have identifed scientifically, was already known to the wise among us and was passed on as traditional wisdom. We can not dismiss something just because it was not scientifically proven. It is a well known fact that most scientific process start with an assumption, which they go on to test and either confirm or reject. Every scientific fact is considered true until proven false.
So, if we can make an educated guess based on our experience and it matches what we see on the ground, I would agree that it is still science. Most scientific discoveries are a result of an accident that the scientist was curious about.
Test counter-intuitive things, only because no one else will
This is another rule that is easier said than done. This assumes that we all have developed intuitions about the problem we are trying to solve and also have the ability to come up with the counter-intuitive solutions to test.
It takes experience, expertise, deep insights and some very creative thinking to come up with the counter-intuitive ideas to test. Once we have these ideas, it is indeed a missed opportunity to not test them.
Solving problems using only rationality is like playing golf with only one club
One of the lessons I learnt from my mentor – Porus Munshi, is that in the physical realm, most problems have one solution but in the human realm, every problem can have infinite solutions. The Laws of the physical world don’t necessarily hold up in the psychological world.
So, for every problem that we attempt to solve, we should use every way possible to solve it – rational, emotional, creative, spiritual, musical, technological, etc.
Sticking to just one way to attempt to solve the problem is leaving many a tools and interesting solutions on the table.
Dare to be trivial
Rory says trivial, I say playful. One of the key lessons that I took away from the seminal book – The Art of Possibility is the importance of Rule No. 6. It simply states that “Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously”. When we are trying to solve tough problems, it helps if we can goof around a bit and ask really trivial questions or question some of the most fundamental assumptions. Real breakthroughs happen when we loosen up and be playful or as Rory says, be trivial.
If there were a logical answer, we would have found it
Logical arguments are easy to follow and make. So, if there is a logical solution to any problem that we are trying to solve, it should be easy enough to find that solution. However, most problems are tough exactly because the logical solutions don’t work. Hence it is important to look not just at the logical solutions to solve tough, complex problems.
In conclusion:
In conclusion, all I would say is that if you are facing a tough problem to solve, keeping these rules in mind and playing with them will do you no harm. In fact, it can help you come up with some interesting and creative solutions that are counter-intuitive to say the least. It is such solutions that give us competitive advantage over a long period of time over our competitors.
IF we want to become Leaders Worth following, we need to be able to show that we and our team can solve tough, wicked problems in unique and creative ways. In order for us to be able to deliver on this promise, we need to practice these skills, much before we are put to test, in small settings, which are low risk and build our collective creative muscle as a team. Then, when the opportunity arrises, we are ready to hit it out of the park.
