The Power of Surprise - Part 1 (with Rory Sutherland)

I first met Rory Stavland in the green room of an old circus in Stockholm. We were both speaking at an event there. It was a kind of beautiful, slightly otherworldly, quite fragile old venue it seemed where Iggy Pop had played the previous week before us. And the performance as a roar in myself while obviously in century in their own way were relatively seduced by comparison. If Rory attempted any crowd surfing, I certainly left it for another day. Rory said something at the time that has always stuck with me. I keep part of his focus at Oglevy then, what was called at the time direct mail. And it's like this, Rory said, "I can talk to any CEO at any company in the world about what I do and it's power with their customer and their ability to transform their business and have them absolutely eating out of my head." But if I then tell that same CEO, it's called direct mail, I think instantly lose interest. Words matter. A change of context, a change of frames, fundamentally orders the way we see exactly the same thing. And one of the reasons that Rory's become as famous as he has is because he's better than just about anyone around, changing the way we see and think about the familiar. He makes the familiar surprising. And in doing so, makes it much more interesting of course. Hello, I'm Adam Morgan. And welcome to the third season and let's make this more interesting for me, Big Fish. And here's a little bit about Rory Sutherland, I guess today, if you're new to him. The vice chairman of Oglevy UK and historically a writer and creative director there, he's also the founder of their behavioral practice. He's a prolific thinker and writer, the author of three books, including the best selling alchemy. He's also been a TED Talk speaker, a chair of the judges at Cannes, and a colonist for the spectator and wired. So if that weren't enough, he's also the hosts on the podcast on brand. And he's joined forces with Mad Masters to lead a 12-week personal development programme. And more recently, as you might know, there's become a TikTok and social media star. As we explore surprise then, there's been a key way of making something more interesting. Rory seemed to me to be a fascinating interview on two levels, potentially. First, he's done some really interesting thinking around the topic of surprise itself, which you'll tell us about. And second, he excels in offering these surprisingly perspectives on familiar topics that I mentioned. And I was really interested exploring how he did it. What was his approach? Has he did it quite so often, quite so consistently? But those are familiar with his interviews. Well, no, that one of the pleasures of a conversation with Rory is that it's not a linear thing. I always feel in fact that talking with Rory is a bit like being an astronomer, discovering a new planet that's constantly generating a series of incandescent new moons that circle it. He's constantly taking out on little side trips, the fascinating ideas in their own right, that continue to orbit the main conversation you are having held together by the gravitational force that is intellect. And because I didn't really want to cut too many of those side trips out for you, I've split the conversation we had into two episodes. In the first episode today, we're going to focus on the work that Rory has done on surprise and listen out for a couple of key points that I think are important for us. The first is his point that we disproportionately pay attention to things that we weren't expecting, things that surprise us. And that this in turn has an impact on what we think is important. Rory goes on to suggest that while it is certainly true that we tend to focus our attention on things that we think are important, the opposite may also be true. Though what more of our attention is focused on, we come to regard as important. A really interesting idea about the value of making something more interesting that we haven't really explored until this point. And the second is a subsequent point about how surprised therefore becomes a very cost efficient way of not only generating active attention on us, our business or our brand, but also differentiating ourselves. But let's start off with Rory's view on the right amount of weird. So Rory, thank you. Welcome to Let's Make It More Interesting. Absolutely. Joy to be here. And wonderful to see you again. And you. And you. So let's, I mean, look, surprise is what we're here to talk about and really focus on. And you've talked a lot and very interesting about surprise. But just to kick off from us at its heart, what does surprise do that makes it so important for us as communicators? By the way, I'm going to start with a caveat, which is my usual, the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Yes. Which is that sometimes your job is to be absolutely not surprising. Yeah. You know, Jeremy Bulmore always made this wonderful point about chain hotels, which is that if you're a very infrequent hotel user, you may want every hotel stay to be absolutely packed with novelty. If you're a very, very heavy user of hotels, just as if you're a very heavy user of airports or a particular airline, there's a very, very large benefit to all the things you don't have to think about. So there is also a market for drillerly predictable. Yes. Well, I'm indeed John Kiran's done some interesting work on innovation has deal looking at how the sweet spot is going 80% familiar, 20% new for most people. You don't want 90% new because that's just too much to process. I've got a perfect phrase to use there, which is speaking to the man who is at BBC 4 who bought the killing for BBC 4 from the Danish state broadcaster. It eventually ended up making the Danish state broadcaster millions because of course Netflix bought the right to the series. But when he first bought it for BBC 4, he paid 24,000 pounds. And it became BBC 4's most popular, certainly their most popular drama by far. And then I think it migrated to BBC 2. I'm not even sure I didn't make it to BBC 1. It was I think the largest viewing figures from BBC 2 for a time. And I asked him, I said, what was it that made you choose Swedish Scandinavian drama Scandinavian Noir? As it's something's going to be called. And he said perfectly, I thought he said, well, for a British audience, the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird. Okay. And I think that's a fair point. I think that 80/20 rule is probably about right. Had you made a drama set in North Korea or in Nepal, what the hell is going on here? What's the great thing about Scandinavians is they're basically like Brits 80% of the time and then they're 20% weird. They're obsession with airing and also the fact that they're both incredibly fond of each other Scandinavians but also incredibly rude to each other. All those little nuances are just the right amount of weird. Yes. Yes. So I'm always going to caveat this thing which is that there is undoubtedly a market for being incredibly predictable because sometimes we just don't want the mental effort required. And there are activities where we want them to be pretty system one, pretty kind of autonomic. In other words, the things we can do without really having to think about it, a lot of brands are very successful precisely because nobody really has to think about them that much. Well, it's the whole thing about a barmer and Steve Chop's weighing the same thing over and over again every day because they didn't want to use up their cognitive processing on that in particular. I met someone who took them to the extreme where they ate the same lunch every day as well. I thought I was going a bit far to be honest, but yeah. So all right, but let's come back to surprise where there is a role for surprise and the value of surprise. Why is it so important as communicators? Do you have said that actually you think most forms of communication needs some aspect of surprise to really gain our attention? If you are innovating, this is very important. If you are attempting to disrupt a category, if you're attempting to be a pirate, if you're attempting to eat big fish, if you want to effectively disrupt what's going on, that does require some degree of attention because otherwise people will default to their usual, what I call the human evolved default modes, which are habit and social copying. Do what I've done before, do what everybody else does. Very safe, low variance default mode. In the sense that if everybody else does it, well, it may not be perfect, but it's probably not going to kill me. Similarly, if I've done it a lot before and I do it again, well, the fact that I've survived the last five occasions probably means it's going to be okay next time. In an evolutionary sense, that makes perfect logical sense. If everybody else is eating the purple berries and the purple berries and everybody else seems to avoid the yellow berries, we would be less intelligent if we wanted to work out everything from first principles. Yes. Because we'd be failing to make use of a lot of ecological information in our environment. However, if you want to actually get people to change behaviour, then some sort of attention, stroke, recontextualisation, stroke, disruption is required. And in that, it probably pays to pay attention to another evolved instinct, which is we disproportionately attend to things that we weren't expecting. And you can even go deep into all sorts of neuroscience and phenomenology in this, which is the theory first promoted, I think, with James and Helmholtz. And now taking up by people like Andy Clark and I think Carl Friston, from right, which is that most of our consciousness, most of what we perceive is actually a prediction. And that we use the limited bandwidths, then our optic nerve or our nasal senses or whatever it may be. We use the limited bandwidth within our nervous system. Effectively, we devote that not to the provision of information, but to the provision of prediction error correction. It's very similar to a JPEG. One of the reasons why I I think it was a lot harder. for people of the 19th century to get this idea across was that we didn't have JPEGs and MPGs and Samsung televisions. They have a very similar data architecture, which is there's an expectation value for every pixel. And information is only conveyed to the extent that a pixel deviates from its expectation value, which means you can actually have a pretty good picture using a hell of a lot less bandwidth and a hell of a lot less data than you need if you simply use this mode of data compression. Okay, so it looks as though the brain and Samsung have both come up within many ways the same data architecture through independent means. And if you think about it, it does make wonderful, wonderful sense, which is, you know, don't devote scarce resources to things that you are expecting anyway. Instead concentrate those limited resources you have on those things which have a heightened significance precisely because you need to correct for your expectation value. But is there a sense in that kind of evolutionary protectionism implicit in those that theory that surprises unwelcome in some way? Because actually there's lots of us that we love surprises in our lives in the right context and the right way in the right context. Yeah, this is an interesting thing because if we clearly there's a calibration involved here because if we evolved effectively mentality where we avoided surprises altogether, we would basically stay indoors in a dark and run. Okay, now that's not a great strategy in evolutionary terms nor neither in terms of survival nor in terms of reproduction. You know, you're not going to meet anybody that way. And so it looks as though depending on all kinds of contextual and other factors, it's a very similar calibration to what sometimes called the Explore Exploits trade-off, which many people believe is kind of almost universal law of nature, which is there is a, well trade-off is probably the wrong word, there is a natural harmony to be found in devoting a certain, certain proportion of your resources to surprising yourself to discovery and a certain proportion of your resources to avoiding surprises. And that will obviously vary depending on what mode you're in, what you're attempting to do. You know, if you have absolutely abundant food at ground level, there's not much point in climbing a tree in order to find some more, but if on the other hand you're extremely hungry. And so this Explore Exploit Inverted Commerce trade-off is found in everything from animal foraging to algorithm design. In fact, it crops up quite a long algorithm design. I even have a friend at King's College London who believes that human neurodiversity is a social level manifestation of this, which is that having a few people in any group of people who think differently or see things differently will make the group overall more effective and more likely to survive and prosper than if everybody is basically trapped in group things. Right, right. Yes, I can entirely believe that. Which seems plausible to me, you know, you can see how having a group of people with ADHD, I mean, ADHD is interesting, by the way, because of course, people with ADHD also have supreme powers of concentration some of the time. So, you know, if you wanted someone to come up with a better design of arrowhead, it probably would be the ADHD guy, you know, or the Asperger guy who might be more likely to do that. Yeah, yeah. So, so what's interesting about that is that undoubtedly, if you're providing a service or an experience or all for that matter, designing a product, having some component of benign surprise seems to me to be fundamentally valuable. The surprising good thing seems to me to be an incredibly cost effective way of creating differentiation for yourself. But I also, if I'm understanding you rightly, because it occupies a disproportionate kind of amount of our sensory processing, there's some sort of multifaceted intake of it really, then it would be if it was an unsurprising experience. It's a little like that line in Citizen Kane, where Kane says, "Make the headline big enough, I'll make the story big enough." Right. So, in a logical sense, we should direct our attention to what's important. But I think the process works in reverse, which is we think things important to which our attention is directed. You sort of mean. So, obviously, when we're living in real time, we can't necessarily plan where we devote our attention and advance because we have to adapt to changing circumstances. And therefore, disproportionately directing your brain power towards those things which weren't expected. We'll therefore, consequently, make those things important. It's very similar to an insight Paul Dolan has added about happiness, which is, you can't control your level of happiness, but you can control what you pay attention to, and that will in turn have a bearing on your happiness. Your relationship between surprising and important is fascinating, because I don't know if you've noticed, but the observer has started, under his new management, has started doing this matrix every week of the news. And one access is important, not important, and one is surprising, not surprising. Not surprising. And they plot the stories on that access. So, it's kind of interesting to see the surprising, but not important and surprising and important. And of course, some of the things are important. I'm not surprising at all. I'm perhaps all to be more surprising, because that way, they would occupy a greater amount of our attention than actually get it. It's undoubtedly true that a lot of things that are very, very significant, for example, in trend spotting. A lot of what's important doesn't necessarily generate a huge amount of discussion. Yeah. Or, may indeed, I would argue, be framed in the wrong way. I thought it abominable that for 35 years, 40 years in Britain, most of my adult life, the media has reported rising property prices as a good news story. Okay. Don't worry, nothing to see here, isn't it wonderful? The value of your house has gone up. Now, that is one of two political, several possible framings, you could regard it as neutral, or you could as I would, regard this highly negative, because ultimately, it leads to intergenerational inequality, the creation of an inheritocracy, and it doesn't even make the individual any better off, because the money isn't actually very liquid. Most people for most of their lives are trying to basically either stay in the same place or up size. It only really benefits people who inherit from their dead relatives, or people who downsize at the end of their lives. So, the idea that this is somehow a great news story. It's great news if your house goes up in value and everybody else is false. Okay, I bark that. Okay. But the idea that everybody's house price is increasing is a good news story. And so, you're absolutely right. I mean, I find it weird how much attention is paid to AI at the moment. Okay. And how little attention is paid to zoom? Simply because video conferencing is an old technology, and therefore it doesn't suit our status to go on stage and go, "Hey, I think one of the most important things that's happened in the last seven years is the freedom to work remotely," for example, the freedom to do what we're doing now. Okay. It's an old technology. It never really hit the hype cycle. What's significant about the technology is not that the technology is particularly new, although there were some recent things like home broadband and so on, which made it more possible. But the really significant thing was that the pandemic created an environment where it was normalized. Okay. And that's still important, but it doesn't get anything like the attention of a technological breakthrough. But it's a psychological breakthrough, nevertheless. Yes. And you tapped up to your point, you'd have to re-context, to reframe it to make it interesting, to make it a bit more surprising, a bit more engaging. I mean, also things that happen slowly don't get talked about very much. So there is an inherent bias in all news, which is recency. Okay. This surprising thing, people like Nassim Talib argue that there's a massive information asymmetry partly created by the need for 24 hour rolling news, which is we need to keep feeding the beast with things that have just happened. Now, a lot of what's awfully important in life happens very, very slowly. You might argue that the whole debate about migration tax, wealth disparity, etc. A lot of the problems that beset us now, a lot of the issues, are actually a product in a sense of cheap air travel. Okay. Which has kind of been with us for 15 years, but people weren't fully taking advantage of the early years of that technology. People weren't taking full advantage of it by, for example, hooping off to a low tax regime and buggling off back to London for three months of every year. It took people a while to kind of figure it out. I mean, there are a lot of technologies, electrification happened like this. The early years of electrification in manufacturing, it was largely applied wrongly, which was like you replaced a steam engine with an electric motor, it didn't bring many gains. It was a only when they finally realized that you have lots of little motors, rather than one big one. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's undoubtedly what you might call a kind of acceleration bias, which is things that are relatively unimportant that have kind of happened rapidly, gain an enormous amount of attention relative to things of huge importance, which are just part of a gradual slow process. Let's come back to the observation you were making about Zoom and AI. Because for me, that's a part of your wonderful appeal. And so it makes you such a similar, gene-interesting person, which is the surprising reversals, taking something that the world has been to roll blindly accepting. And say, let's just look the other way a little bit and see what happens, and taking us in a surprising different direction. I suppose the only reason I'm famous for this is I'm very conscious of the fact that all human perception is context dependent. And therefore, a degree of enlightenment is to be found simply by recontextualising things. And one way you can recontextualise things, by the way, is by changing not just the frame, good or bad house prices going up, but also the chronological frame. Was it good news in the short term, the women good end of the workforce? Absolutely fantastic. You could have two incomes, pay the same rent, whoop do you do, you know, whereafter the race is, you know. And also it was voluntary, okay? Which is there was no obligation on one party in any two-person relationship, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, okay? There was no obligation on both people to actually go out to work in order to maintain a basically tolerable household. Yes. Right? Or to bring up children. Suddenly, what happens is that over a longer time frame, what starts as an option becomes an obligation. It's what I call "southern's law of parking apps", okay? Wonderful. Perhaps when I first moved to Seven Eggs, there was a lovely guy there at the station car park and you gave him some money and he gave you change. You worked very well but it didn't require a person, okay? It also meant that you could say it's not worth paying tomorrow, yeah? Okay, but you can't do with a machine, no, it's okay. Now by contrast, then they replaced it with a machine which as the prices of parking in Seven Eggs went up required you at one stage to have seven pound coins just to actually pay for the parking. Then the app came along, whoop, to do absolutely glorious, okay? Because now you can just, you didn't even have to walk anywhere, you just walk straight to the train and while you're waiting for your train, you'd pay to park because the chap's you'd check your number plate didn't generally come around till later. And that was fantastic, but you still have the choice of the coin machine, okay? And what happens is businesses notice that the, both the fraud costs and the maintenance costs of parking apps are significantly lower than having coin machines or credit card machines. So suddenly you've got no choice but to pay by app and you find yourself having to attempt to pay by app in an underground car park where there's no mobile signal, okay? Because they've imposed this thing on you and it started as an option and options are generally great things if you add to someone's option. And I feel as often clear, okay, there's the paradox of choice, but generally if you offer people more options, I would argue that it's welfare improving for the most part, okay? However, what then happens is that, as this happened actually with McDonald's, where I noticed that McDonald's is opening a letter restaurant where you can only order on a screen. Now, those screens were wonderful things where you had the option if there was a queue or if you want to order three burgers for yourself and were there for embarrassed, those screens were wonderful, wonderful things. But now they've gone from being an option to an obligation. So that's another case where, suddenly, the whole thing, you can reframe and re-contextuate those things and they deliver completely different meanings. And the healthy, I think the healthy creative human activity is to try as many frames on as you possibly can, chronological or contextual. So this has brought us on to the value of recontextualising and its power if we want to make the familiar topics so part of every day that we don't rethink about them anymore, surprising and engaging. And of course, we all know at some level how important context is and in fact, I'm planning to do a separate episode at some point, simply around framing and the notion of what we're going to call the governing frame of a category or business or a conversation. I'm fascinated by that sense and the perceptual difference that changing the frame makes, how much bigger the switch from framing the activity as jogging to thinking of it as running, has increased the user appeal, self-image and size of that category, for example. And what's it take a completely different business at the origination of the concept of superfoods in a book at the early 90s, help reframe blueberries in the work of the Sunday Times recently from unmuffet ingredients to a miracle berry and earned all the value of all kinds that comes from that. What's unusual about Rory as a thinker, I think, is how much and how well he does this. Look at his point about chronological retextualizing, specifically, along with broadroppertings to change the frame and how, in his words, the healthy, creative human activity is to try as many frames as you can, not just one or two, but as many frames as you can. So I wanted to understand how he does it, how is he come to make it a fundamental part of the way he thinks and stimulates his audiences and us. So listen out in the next part of the conversation to his concept of bringing a game theorist's mindset to what he does. And some of the particular techniques he uses to get to his more surprising ideas like the one he's borrowed of reverse benchmarking. And have you always been like that, or is it a natural nurture? You've always been like, you'd naturally thought that way, even as a teenage, or is there something you've learnt to bring as your creative superpower? Yeah, yes, it's kind of a willful perversity might be another way of putting it in that I also think always had a little bit of a game theorist's mindset. So this I've, for example, applied to my own property buying, which is my point, which other people have stolen from me and I'm delighted to say I've used it to good effect, which is, don't find things you like in a property. Look for things that you don't mind that other people hate. Right. Because, you know, then you'll get a much cheaper property. A classic example. My parents-in-law didn't buy a house next to a pub because they thought they might be disturbed by the noise. Now, I never going to sneak before one o'clock in the morning anyway. And I don't mind noise, especially where, but I should be in the pub. It wasn't a rough pub. It was an absolutely wonderful foodie pub in the country, okay? Which they went to themselves. They patronized the pub themselves, but they didn't want to live next door to it. Now, I thought they were completely arranged. But I mean, what I was doing was I was finding something next to a pub or a railway line, which other people would hate railway lines for some weird reason, completely new value hoped. But other people would hate it. I personally would either like it or be neutral about it. Bingo. I've just found some discretionary value. There's a arbitrage opportunity there. And of course, it's what advertising is. You may remember this. Jeremy Clarkson went to the creative duo then heading up TVB. No, BMP might have been actually. And they wanted him to do an ad. It was a car that had never made a diesel in there before. And so Jeremy Clarkson goes along to this creative duo and says, "So what you want me to say is this car is now better because you can put it in a Persia." Anyway, they said, "No, no, no, no, that's completely wrong. The way you say this is diesel is now better because you can put it in a fit." And so generally, when you perform this exercise, although it often feels sort of wilfully perverse and a bit silly, it generally delivers some sort of illumination. In other words, the same thing presented the other way around. Often generates a completely different emotional response than us. Okay? So you know, this is one. My book's loud. We are number two, so we try harder. Okay? Number two, Avis isn't as big as Hertz. Hertz has more locations. It has more cars. It has a wider choice of cars. If your car breaks down, they're more likely to provide you with a replacement car. In most respects, everybody would go, "No, not really keen on Avis than all as big as Hertz." But what you suddenly do is you basically take the smallest beautiful mindset and say, because when we can't rest on our laurels, we can't just die back and wait for network effects to do their work. We actually have to make an effort to please our customers. What you've done there is you've basically turned the negative into a positive. Well, that's why I think Avis is the kind of God-parent of all challenges really, because it's the first to celebrate that apparent inferiority and turn it into an advantage. I reassuringly expensive for Stellar Artoire. You know, good things come to those who wait for Guinness. There's a kind of thing where, again, it's about attention. So you can either distract attention away from your negative. Or you can attract attention to your negative by what you might call disarming candor or acknowledgement of the negative. And then get people to look at it in a completely different light. Okay? So yes, Guinness is painfully slow to pour, but on the other hand, you know, you can look at it as a kind of philosophical, a more philosophical pint precisely because of that pause. Something to about reference points entirely outside the category up there. So I loved what was intrigued by the Meryl Street thing about women in Afghanistan have less rights than a squirrel, for instance. That's an extraordinary juxtaposition, which we've got. We in the UK know, Gen Oliver doing about, you know, "Oh, kids get outside less than a prisoner does." Well, used to that. There's a famous ad for the 1950s, which David Ogleby sites in Ogleby on advertising, which if you can remember, I think it was for a campaign group, which said, "A hog can cross the country without changing trains, but you can't." So instead of saying, "Isn't it stupid that you can't change, that you, in order to get from New York to Los Angeles or wherever it was, you have to change in Chicago." Instead of saying that, which is, you know, yes, it's an, it's an accurate sentence as far as it goes, but it's not very arresting. Making the point that pigs enjoy transport privileges that humans don't is of the us the more interesting way of saying. Yes, well, and by the same token, I suppose, every hot summer, somebody runs a headline talking about the fact that the heat of which we are traveling in the northern line would be banned for cattle, you know, traveling in transporting trucks or something that we are putting us through something that the EU had those days of ban for their kind. So, I can figure, so that's right. So there's, there's kind of recontextualizing. There's changing the frames of reference in that kind of way. And also in terms of brands, right? So, so clearly, I'm really intrigued by brands who completely changed the nature of the category reference. So you'll remember that, I mean, a long time ago now, that wonderful moment where the mini challenged Porsche, the CEO of mini challenged the CEO of Porsche to a race, you know, to a dual as it were on the track in some kind of way. And then you look at, I think John Edons had the, the CMO of Elf cosmetics on and they were talking about the fact that they are very, very reasonably priced, but can pay out, you know, the quality, competitive, comparable to the best kind of, but I love those kind of complete jacks to positions of surprise and efforts. There's things to be to a wonderful paper, which I think has a bearing on this whole discussion. It's actually a medium post by my own personal guru and Stephen Galley, Roger L. Martin, Canadian business writer. The post is called benchmarking as for losers. And he argues that benchmarking is very popular with management consulting firms, because it's highly labor intensive. And it effectively means that you focus on exactly the same metrics, typically those of your dominant competitor and compare yourself to them. And I've recently started becoming a big devotee of something I call reverse benchmarking, which is to find out what your competitor isn't doing, to do that thing well and to double down on it. Double down on it both in terms of investment in the product and features and investment in communication of those product features. So, you know, the extraordinary case of reverse benchmarking after all is Apple, which is lots and lots of nerds were competing with each other based on typically numerical metrics, typically those inherited kind of from IBM, which were all about processing power and, you know, ram and memory capacity and all those things. Okay? In the process, they'd become more and more alike because they were fixated on the same thing. And therefore, in direct competition with each other, from a game they couldn't really win. And Apple comes along with a guy who actually couldn't even code Steve Jobs and goes, "What you're neglecting in this process is both aesthetics and look and feel and usability." And I'm not going to be totally suboptimal on those measures of processing power. You know, we can all debate that, you know, to what extent Apple's leadership is catnological leadership. And it, you know, that ebbs and flows. Okay? Until Apple came along, as I was saying to speedily other day, if you put a computer in any room of your house, you turn it into an office. I mean, well, you could have had a room of chats with once you put an IBM PC in the corner. You might as well put in six filing cabinets or fucking photocopying because you'd basically turn the room into an office. And Steve Jobs came along, I mean, the IMAC is one of the most glorious things, actually, later on. But basically with an Eastseats eye, rather than a technological eye, and double down on that as a source of differentiation. And the story which gave me my insight about reverse benchmarking was one in Will Gadara's book, unreasonable hospitality. I don't know if you know it. Very, very good book indeed. And I'd recommend anybody in marketing, particularly if they've got a customer experience or customer service string to their bow. I'd absolutely recommend they read this book. Gadara was running a Michelin III star restaurant in New York, which was in the San Pilarine restaurant once was the 50th best restaurant out of 50 in their world, this of the best 50 restaurants. And in 2011, he comes in at number 50 and he decides he wants to get to number one. And he takes all his, you know, a cross section of his team to the number one restaurant, and they all start jotting down things that it does well that they could copy. And Gadara with a game theorist's mind, okay? Gadara effectively goes, "I'm not interested in any of that stuff, because all we'll be doing is matching them. We won't be differentiating it ourselves." What I want to know is what do they do slightly disappointingly? It's not much that's going to be disappointing in the world's best restaurant, three star Michelin bloody bloody bloody. Except they came up with two things. The people who drank beer got second class service compared to the people who drank wine. And the coffee was nothing special. So he goes back to his own restaurant, appoints a beer sommelier and a coffee sommelier. There was a waiter and I think someone in the kitchen who were obsessed respectively with premium craft ails and with sort of single origin fancy coffees and roasts and all that sort of stuff. And their job was to make those two parts of the meal absolutely amazing. And it strikes me that reverse benchmarking is something which has Roger L. Martin points out, you know, management consultancies are never going to help you do it because it requires imagination and it involves the degree of uncertainty and it lacks proper quantification and there are millions of millions of dollars to be made by getting people into a room for 48 hours and getting them to think of ideas. And it's not actually that difficult. It just requires, you know, that sort of Sherlock, Sherlock-y in moment of spotting the dog that doesn't bark in the night, which is not the things that our competitors have that we don't have or which we don't do as well. Go and look for the things your competitors aren't doing at all. Yes, I love that. Tell me what you were saying that part of this reflected a game theorist's mind. What do you mean by a game theorist's mind for those of us that are not familiar with a game theorist? You can argue their aspects of this in military strategy and everything else, which is if the purpose is to outwit or beat or defeat somebody else, don't necessarily play by their rules. Okay, so if you adopt wholeheartedly and unquestioningly the conventions of your own category in terms of packaging, pricing, whatever it may be, okay? To the extent you will find it in a. It's not impossible that you can achieve category leadership, but it's going to be expensive and it's going to be temporary. Whereas if you go and effectively go off at 90 degrees, okay? If you seek out the road less traveled, your chance of success may be slightly less predictable, but in the event of success you'll have the territory to yourself. So it's a kind of okay, I'll give you an example of this, right? I don't know why it is. I was in Spain the other day and I was staying in a hotel in a place called Carmono, which isn't far from Seville. And I looked out because the hotel was actually pretty cheap, okay? I booked a pretty bling-ass room, which was still only about 100 and was something. It was 100 and something euros from the night, okay? I looked out over the view and I simply said to my wife, this is weird because if this viewer were of Tuscany, this hotel would have cost the 600 euros, okay? And then I said, this is weird when you think about it, which is the spanish. When people go on holiday to Spain, they all go to the coast, but when Brits go to Italy, they all go in land, okay? And for some reason, most people who want to go to Spain or Portugal want to go to the seaside, but for some reason nobody in Britain goes to the Italian seaside, I don't know why not, they all go in land and go, "Oh look, there's Senjuminiano." And, "Oh, we can go over the mountains of the moon to see the Pirate de Lefrancesters." But it didn't occur to me. The way to gain the system is that when you go on holiday to Spain, you go and stay in land or when you go on holiday to Italy, you go to the seaside, okay? I love that. Hold on, don't like the game theorist. It's just a weird default. I have said this in this better day. There are too many pictures of the Virgin Mary. I get it, right? Okay? But after going around some of those museums, I'm kind of going, "Oh, I hope the next room has got like five spitfires in front of the white cliffs of Dover or a blower Bentley going around bank section of the track at Brooklyn's because I could really do a change, it would do a change for all this stuff." My dad always said that whenever he went around Venice, after a couple of days, he got what he called tinta reto nec because he'd been looking up like that and got, so it is upper, you know, spinal or something or other, started to fuse with each other in that kind of way. Oh, rich people, you're not too rich, you must be quite rich by now. I wish I could say I was, but no, I'm not. But really rich people become weirdly done because they're insisting, they insist on using their money to compete with other rich people who are extraordinary conformists in terms of how they can signal status. So one of the problems of becoming really really rich is that the number of ways in which you can signal your wealth become smaller and smaller and smaller. And so you end up, whereas you could actually be better off with a tenth of the wealth by doing things creatively and by gaming the system, instead you insist on playing the game by its own rules, which is sulkum. Okay? Yes. It's all right, but okay. I mean, sulkum is like 900,000 pounds for what actually wouldn't go. One hundred four million for a fisherman's cottage and the place is fucking heaving in August and it's bloody miles away from London. Okay? Well, what the fuck's all about? I mean, but naturally there's a huge sway of the people who go, I could only consider myself successful by direct comparison with everybody else. That's some level. Okay, I get it. You know, your next door neighbors got a Ford Monday. Oh, show my age, yeah, right? I'd quite like a Ford Monday. There is a degree of kind of utility in your getting a Ford Monday, just like a neighbor as well as sort of status values. But when it becomes pathological and these people are competing to build mega yachts or something, it's an incredibly expensive alternative to creativity. No, I get that. I used to work with somebody who is the MD of the Agency Amazon and he had a yacht that was 10 feet longer than his best friends. And that that was the important thing about the yacht. It wasn't the quality of a word or though that kind of stuff. It's the fact that they get worse as they get bigger because you can't go into small harbors or anchor off little beaches. And the extent to which most people of paradise spoke to luxury yacht brokers who said most people actually quite enjoy the first yacht they have after that it just turns into a kind of insanity. Yeah. So coming back to surprise, clearly you have been a long a champion of, you know, behavioral science and have built up, you know, that significant business around that within Oble to be what's the role of surprise within behavioral science? One of the most influential books I've ever read was Purple Cow by Seth Godin. I think it was very early book in the 1990s. Yeah. Yeah. Where you said effectively you'd design for attention to some degree. Now going back to that original caveat of just the right amount of weird. Okay. If Dyson had made his vacuum cleaners a peg, regardless of the baglessness and the superior suction cyclomete technology. Okay. He wouldn't have sold very many. The transparency of the Dyson is I think instrumental to its success. Fundamental. Fundamental. And there may be a psychological component that which is we actually enjoy vacuuming more if we can actually see the dirt that's being removed from the carpet. It makes it seem less like a futile activity. But also it was it completely defied. By the way, he was more or less alone in this design choice. Everybody else was going, are you crazy James? You know, people don't want to see the dirt that's being removed from their carpet. You know, look at Bila, look at everybody else. They all hide everything within a bag. To be honest, it may have been misbased. He may have wanted people to see the glory of his own engineering superiority. And the actual appeal may have been something else where it may have been simply that it was attention grabbing. You know, it said not only am I different, I am visibly different. So purple cow, one of those books, you know, which by the way, I mean, books in marketing the role are still absolutely worth reading. I'm positioning the battle for the mic. Okay. By recent trout, Dave Tross and I are at one in agreeing this was one of those kind of eye opening books we read where we kind of having worked at advertising for some years at the time when, oh, now it's starting to make sense. And so the idea, you know, their idea of of positioning yourself against something. Now again, there's probably in recent trout, there's just the right amount of weird. In other words, you don't want to be something which is in a category of one necessarily. But the idea, their idea of describing Jamaica as the Hawaii of the Caribbean or grow up to burga key. In other words, what they wanted to do is tape McDonald's natural family friendly brad and make burger king seem like the kind of, you know, the grown-up subversion of a burger, you know, clown not, clown not included. Okay. They're, you know, their own writings there, which I thought were inspired and I still think, by the way, everybody in our business should read that book. You know, just, you know, David Oglevey, I've just done a lot of this stuff. But there's something there about the idea that I think there's something in reverse benchmarking simply because I've just given a something I think everybody did instinctively. I think I've just given it a name and it's pre-armetry name at that. But I think it's an exercise which is really, really healthy. As people know, watch my podcast. I'm a big fan of the Moxie hotel shape. Okay. And it's okay. Everybody's focused on the runs. Well, making the runs perfectly good, but they won't be very big. They'll just be a TV and a bed and a minimal storage space. And we won't have room service and we won't have a laundry service. But we'll make the grand floor experience kind of amazing. But anyway, there also attend to been pretty good locations. And so part of the way they can make it work is they, if you, if you're willing to make the run small, you can actually occupy quite a good location in the middle of town next to a letter of a nightlife. And rather than just saying, we'll make this a compromised hotel experience. What you do is you take one aspect of the hotel experience, which hotels generally don't do all that well, which is what to do in the hotel when you're not in your rut. I mean, obviously country house hotels, they can make it work. But the Moxie for an urban hotel just, you know, just effectively has doubled down on this and has made it their great differentiating quality. And then having used a Moxie, you basically go, I wouldn't stay in one for a week. But if ever I've got a two-night stay, I'm actually staying in Can for the Can advertising festival. I'm staying in the Moxie, it's safer and and topless, which is about 10 miles away, which is about the right distance. You know, I'll go and can as a bit like Chernobyl, you know, it's interesting, but you don't want to get too close. And I can then hire a car and just drive in whenever I feel like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end of Stephen Spielberg's film The Fable Mons, loosely based on the director's own childhood, he recreates a true story from his teens where he met the legendary film director, John Ford. In this scene, Ford has just come back from lunch and is in a cantankerous mood and Spielberg is ushered into his office. So Ford says belligerently to the young man, you want to be a picture maker. Go over to that piece of art on the wall and tell me what you see. Spielberg complies and starts describing the two riders in the painting and Ford interrupts him. No, no, no, no, he says, where's the horizon? It's at the bottom of the picture, Spielberg says. Okay, Ford says, go over to that other painting. What do you see? Spielberg just starts describing the figures in that picture, two and Ford interrupts him again. No, no, no, he says, where's the horizon? It's right at the top. Spielberg says. Now remember this says, Ford, when the horizons at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizons at the top, it's interesting. When the horizons in the middle, it's boring as hell. Now get out of my office. For a filmmaker, of course, the placement of the horizons is a very literal visual frame that affects our fundamental perspective on what we're seeing, even with very familiar sites. And it becomes a constant part of therefore how they set up everything they present. And worry is the same here, isn't he? While you are, while your eye might do this occasionally, he's always exploring the possibility of a different frame, different context, now to find competitive advantage by seeing the familiar through that new lens. Oh, and along the way, tweaking the way that we see Scandinoire parking apps zoom and the influencer acceleration bars. So here's the question I'm going to leave this with. How often are we ourselves just automatically putting the horizon in the middle? And how if we want to make what we are saying more compelling more often, do we get much more used to putting the contextual horizon at the bottom of the top instead? In the second part of the conversation with Rory in the next episode, we'll begin by discussing the relationship of surprise to behavioral economics and come onto a fascinating conversation about the exploit, explore trade-off and Gaussian distributions. No, I hadn't heard of them either. I'm a classicist for God's sake. And so I'm going to explain a bit of it before we start just so we're on the same playing field. I should say perhaps that Rory then does go on and ask me the most surprising question I've been asked by any of the guests so far, which it caused me a slight intake of breath. And I couldn't really believe I was about to answer on air, so to speak TMI, but then he's a very persuasive man. Thanks for listening to Let's make some more interesting, but you big fish. I'd like to thank Ruth, my editor, Ross, my producer and tiny podcasts. I hope to see you next time.