From the excellent Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland:

In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can. Yet we never seem to believe that it is possible for logical solutions to fail. After all, if it makes sense, how can it possibly be wrong?

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If you are a technocrat, you’ll generally have achieved your status by explaining things in reverse; the plausible post-rationalisation is the stock-in-trade of the commentariat. Unfortunately, it is difficult for such people to avoid the trap of assuming that the same skills that can explain the past can be used to predict the future.

The world trades in stories, but compelling stories aren’t necessarily true. See also: hindsight bias. The post hoc seeming inevitability of where we are now is a mirage.

Adam Smith, the father of economics – but also, in a way, the father of behavioural economics – clearly spotted this fallacy over two centuries ago. He warned against the ‘man of system’, who: ‘is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse [sic] to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.’

This chess piece argument is also a metaphor favored by conservative economist Thomas Sowell as the key failing conceit of central planning.

The problem that bedevils organisations once they reach a certain size is that narrow, conventional logic is the natural mode of thinking for the risk-averse bureaucrat or executive. There is a simple reason for this: you can never be fired for being logical. If your reasoning is sound and unimaginative, even if you fail, it is unlikely you will attract much blame. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.

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The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.

The primary function of managers is to preserve their position within management. The second function is to be promoted. The distant third is to actually manage people well or improve their organizations. (Further Reading: Academic Medicine and the Peter Principle)

The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’*

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It is fine to provide up-to-date magazines in reception to show that you care, but when the urge to show commitment to patients involves performing unnecessary tests and invasive surgery, it probably needs to be reined back.

Yes. I am reminded of Patient Satisfaction: A Danger to be Avoided.

If you want to change people’s behaviour, listening to their rational explanation for their behaviour may be misleading, because it isn’t ‘the real why’. This means that attempting to change behaviour through rational argument may be ineffective, and even counterproductive. There are many spheres of human action in which reason plays a very small part. Understanding the unconscious obstacle to a new behaviour and then removing it, or else creating a new context for a decision, will generally work much more effectively.

Behavior change is hard. I can barely control a whole host of my own impulses, let alone guide others.

The self-regarding delusions of people in high-status professions lie behind much of this denial of unconscious motivation. Would you prefer to think of yourself as a medical scientist pushing the frontiers of human knowledge, or as a kind of modern-day fortune teller, doling out soothing remedies to worried patients? A modern doctor is both of these things, though is probably employed more for the latter than the former. Even if no one – patient or doctor – wants to believe this, it will be hard to understand and improve the provision of medical care unless we sometimes acknowledge it.

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To put it crudely, when you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies this rule to choosing a doctor: you don’t want the smooth, silver-haired patrician who looks straight out of central casting – you want his slightly overweight, less patrician but equally senior colleague in the ill-fitting suit. The former has become successful partly as a result of his appearance, the latter despite it.

The Taleb reference is commonly referenced even if it may not always work in real life. It’s one of those lightbulb-generating remarks that strikes that magic of being surprisingly intuitive after seeming counterintuitive.

There is an important corollary: proxy metrics (patrician manner, various training factors) don’t actually mean what we want them to mean. You want to see a Harvard-trained doctor because you assume they are better through the implied meritocratic scarcity of an elite institution and the presumption that therefore, surrounded by other geniuses and some presumably fancy digs, their training was uniquely better–but there is no actual basis for this belief.

In making decisions, we should at times be wary of paying too much attention to numerical metrics. When buying a house, numbers (such as number of rooms, floor space or journey time to work) are easy to compare, and tend to monopolise our attention. Architectural quality does not have a numerical score, and tends to sink lower in our priorities as a result, but there is no reason to assume that something is more important just because it is numerically expressible.

Measurability does not equal importance. See “Overweighing what can be counted” in Munger’s Incorrect Approaches to Medicine.

The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.

…I naively thought Covid would bring people together. And it did, for maybe a week or two. Then the dueling data wars began.

We are flush with data. Absolutely awash in data. If the past few years of social media have taught us anything, it’s that information isn’t truth. It’s raw material for storytelling. Yoval Noah Harari does a nice if depressing job discussing information networks in his recent book, Nexus.

There’s a common first-things-first productivity parable of the rocks and the jar. It goes like this:

Imagine you have an empty jar that represents your life, and you have different sizes of rocks that represent different priorities and commitments. The big rocks represent the most important things in life, like your family and health. Medium rocks would be secondary priorities like intermediate career goals, social commitments–other worthwhile but less crucial activities. And finally, the small rocks and sand represent the minor daily tasks, distractions, and time-fillers that can easily consume our attention.

The thrust: If you fill your jar with sand and small rocks first, you won’t have room for the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, then the medium rocks, the sand will filter down into the spaces between them – and everything fits.

From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:

Here the story ends—but it’s a lie. The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.

That tracks.

The Art of Creative Neglect Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. I’m borrowing this phrasing from the graphic novelist and creativity coach Jessica Abel, who borrowed it in turn from the world of personal finance, where it’s long been an article of faith because it works.

Abel saw that her only viable option was to claim time instead—to just start drawing, for an hour or two, every day, and to accept the consequences, even if those included neglecting other activities she sincerely valued. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”

From both of these passages, my takeaway is that we can’t hope it actually choose all the rocks in some cohesive way. Avoid some of the useless filler sand, sure. But, maybe, don’t wait and just choose a rock sometimes:

Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies this simple insight: if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

The easy trap is the too many coals in the fire:

The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.

I’m trying to work through a backlog of abandoned work, but at this point my inability to focus, attend, and limit possibilities is a core character flaw.

From “The how we need now: A capacity agenda for 2025 and beyond,” published by the Niskanen Center think tank.

What are the forces making the government so slow? The first of those dysfunctions is what Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan calls the “procedure fetish,” and we dub the bureaucratic anxiety cycle. Anxiety about legitimacy and accountability drives critics to demand, and bureaucrats to seek refuge behind, more and more layers of procedure that show things have been done “by the book.” But all that procedure further erodes both legitimacy and accountability by overburdening the bureaucracy, reducing its ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.

In the addition to the government, tell me this doesn’t summarize every large company you’ve ever dealt with, especially any that deal in a high-regulation industry like healthcare.

They go on to flesh out the “Cascade of Rigidity” with a helpful infographic:

Well-intentioned laws and regulations become increasingly inflexible and counterproductive as they evolve toward implementation. The authors argue part of the solution is shifting focus:

The revised system must shift its emphasis from compliance to meeting mission needs. This means power to make decisions must shift from compliance personnel to the people closest to the work.

The vicious cycle of growing bureaucracy and procedural bloat requires a reversion to our ultimate goals: a need to serve the mission and not its own machinery.

“This means power to make decisions must shift from compliance personnel to the people closest to the work.”

No easy feat.

Old advice from Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel (back when Intel was killing it), from a 2007 Esquire interview:

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.

The problem, as anyone who has used an EHR or any other enterprise software, is that the problem being solved (e.g. optimal billing) may itself create a wealth of downstream problems (e.g. frustrating, inefficient healthcare).

Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.

Beware the arrival fallacy.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

This is ironic in that post-Grove Intel entirely missed the boat on mobile an increasing fraction of everyone’s devices utilize the ARM architecture.

It’s also so painfully clear that this manifests in the lack of institutional and cultural knowledge that plagues schools, organizations, and the government. We rest on the status quo when it works until it doesn’t.

But the problems compound when we then forget the parts that got us there in the first place in our desire for improvement.

Sometimes inefficiency is a critical piece of the puzzle (like we saw with Covid supply chain issues). Other times, we are unaware of the lessons from the past and miss the negative externalities of our panicked interventions.

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

We have to live in the world as it is.

There’s never enough time.

True and true.

From “People systematically overlook subtractive changes,” published in Nature back in 2021:

Participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.

In so many cases, the easiest, cheapest solution to a problem is to simplify. It’s just so hard to remember/realize/acknowledge that—especially at an organizational or regulatory level—without skin in the game.