Author: David Greenwood

💎 On how, once we decide upon a way of thinking, we struggle to see the other side

One important study of the power of such decision-frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon.

Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one.

What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At to very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frame—This is an investment in my education verses this is a distraction from my family

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On the illusion of progress being a motivating factor to continue (a diet)

One place to start is to highlight ways people already agree or are already moving on in the desired direction. One diet and exercise book cleverly leverages this idea. Rather than starting off by trying to convince people to be healthier, the author points out that this is something they already want: “Congratulations! Whether you realize it or not, simply by picking up this book you have taken the first of what I hope will be many steps, both large and small, simple and challenging, toward the most rewarding journey of all—the road to reclaiming your physical health, well-being, and happiness.” By pointing out ways people are already on board, the author encourages readers to see their position on the field as closer to the end goal. Which makes them likely to stick around for the next phase of the journey (Greene, 2002, p. 9).

Excerpt from: Catalyst by Jonah Berger

💎 On people we think of as exceptionally creative (essentially being intellectual middleman)

Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psycho-therapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.

“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers.

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On the downside of working from home (the spread of new ideas from weak ties)

In the 1970s, sociologist Mark Granovetter suggested that information could spread further through acquaintances than through close friends. This was because friends would often have multiple links in common, making most transmission redundant. ‘If one tells a rumor to all his close friends, and they do likewise, many will hear the rumor a second and third time, since those linked by strong ties tend to share friends.’ He referred to the importance of acquaintances as the ‘strength of weak ties’: if you want access to new information, you may be more likely to get it through a casual contact than a close friend.’

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 On analysing successful brands and looking for a recipe for success (is often misleading)

A quick hypothesis: say one million monkeys speculate on the stock market. They buy and sell stocks like crazy, and, of course, completely at random. What happens? After one week, about half of the monkeys will have made a profit and the other half a loss. The ones that made a profit can stay; the ones that made a loss you send home. In the second week, one half of the monkeys will still be riding high, while the other half will have made a loss and are sent home. And so on. After ten weeks, about 1,000 monkeys will be left — those who have always invested their money well. After twenty weeks, just one monkey will remain — this one always, without fail, chose the right stocks and is now a billionaire. Lets call him the success monkey.

How does the media react? They will pounce on this animal to understand its “success principles”. And they will find some: perhaps the monkey eats more bananas than the others. Perhaps he sits in another corner of the cage. Or, maybe he swings headlong through the branches, or he takes long, reflective pause while grooming. He must have some recipe for success, right? How else could he perform so brilliantly? Spot-on for twenty weeks — and that from a simple money? Impossible!

Also known as: Outcome Bias.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On the power of loss aversion in healthcare (increased awareness)

For this reason, if you want to convince someone about something, don’t focus on the advantages; instead highlight how it helps them dodge the disadvantages. Here is an example from a campaign promotion breast self-examination (BSE): two different leaflets were handed out to women. Pamphlet A urged: “Research shows that women who do BSE have an increased change of finding a tumour in the early, non treatable stage of the disease”. Pamphlet B said: “Research shows that women who do not do BSE have a decreased chance of finding a tumour in the early, more treatable stage of the disease.: The study revealed that pamphlet B (written in a “loss-frame”) generated significantly more awareness and BSE behaviour than pamphlet A (written in “gain-frame”).

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On giving the story a face (statistics don’t stir us, people do)

In another experiment, psychologist Paul Slovic asked people for donations. One group was shown a photo of Rokia from Malawi, an emaciated child with pleading eyes. Afterward, people donated an average of $2.83 to the charity (out of $5 they were given to fill out a short survey). The second group was shown statistics about the famine in Malawi, including the fact that more than three million malnourished children were affected, The average donation dropped by 50%. This is illogical: you would think that people’s generosity would grow if they know the extent of the disaster. But we do not function like that. Statistics don’t stir us; people do.

The media have long known that factual reports and bar charts do not entice readers. Hence the guideline: give the story a face.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On why we often, mistakenly, think the past was a golden age (we just forgot about all the shitty shit)

This argument — for example, “Why isn’t music as good as it used to be?” — reflects a historical selection bias, one colorfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”

Excerpt from, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt

💎 On the danger of interpreting data at face value (Alex Ferguson’s mistake selling Jaap Stam)

Another example, this time involving Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, didn’t have such a happy ending. Opta data showed that his star defender, Jaap Stam, was making fewer tackles each season. Ferguson promptly offloaded him in August 2001 to Lazio — keen to earn a high transfer fee before the decline became apparent to rival clubs.

However, Stam’s career blossomed in Italy and Ferguson realised his error — the lower number of tackles was a sign of Stam’s improvement, not decline. He was losing the ball less and intercepting more passes that he needed to make fewer tackles. Ferguson says selling Stam was the biggest mistake of his managerial career. From then on he refused to be seduced by simplistic data.

These criticisms don’t mean you should disregard tracking data. Expecting any methodology to be perfect is to burden it with unreasonable expectations. Instead, you need to be aware that it merely provides evidence to which you need to apply your discretion and judgement.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On changing the subjective experience rather than the objective reality (Houston airport baggage waiting times)

In the early 2000s, the management at Houston airport was dismayed by the number of passenger complaints it was receiving.

The main issue was delays at the baggage carousel: by this point passengers were often at the end of their tether and even trivial delays tested their patience.

In response, the airport approved a hefty budget for more baggage handlers. At first, the cash looked well spent as waiting times dropped to eight minutes, about average for an airport. But complaints remained stubbornly high.

The authorities considered hiring more baggage handlers but that was prohibitively expensive. Instead, the managers took a psychological approach: they focused on improving the subjective experience rather than the objective reality.

One fact they had discovered earlier became key: people spent about a minute walking to the carousel and eight minutes waiting. The authorities re-routed passengers after passport control so they had to walk further. This meant they spent about eight minutes walking to the carousel and just a minute waiting.

Even though the time they picked up their bags was the same, complaints plummeted. In the words of Alex Stone, who reported on the Houston redesign for the New York Times, “the experience of waiting is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait”. What matters more is perception and an unoccupied wait feels far longer than an occupied one.

Excerpt from: ‘Customer experience is as much about perception as reality’ in Marketing Week

💎 On anchoring in practice (at Apple)

The same approach can be used to communicate initial product value. Steve Jobs used anchoring during the launch of the Apple iPad to such effect. At one of his fames launch presentations, he introduced the “rumoured cost” that was speculated to be $999. This information anchored the press to the notion this would be the high-priced product. However, when Jobs later in the event revealed the iPad to be priced at $499, this “anchoring and reveal” tactic created a notion of value for money.

Excerpt from: Northstar

💎 On the more we see a statement, the more likely we are to believe it’s true (illusion-of-truth effect)

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in precious weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as trie, even if they swore they has never heard it before.

Excerpt from; Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

💎 On the myth that talent alone is enough (the Beatles were not an overnight success)

To the USA, the Beatles were an overnight success, but in fact Lennon and McCartney had been playing together since 1957. In the clubs of Hamburg they performed/endured live non-stop shows for eight hours a day, seven days a week until two o’clock in the morning, and had to work incredibly hard to attract audiences from the many clubs in Hamburg competing for attention. Their abilities and confidence increased. By 1964 they had played roughly 1,200 times, totalling thousands of hours’ playing time, more than most rock bands play there entire careers. Those hours performing set the Beatles apart. They were addicted to practice, yet their rehearsing was not repetitive but adventurous. They didn’t play the classic rock songs of the time over and over until they sounded exactly like the originals, as other bands did; they experimented and improvised, constantly embellishing the standards until they made them their own. They understood there was nothing to be gained from mechanical reputation.

Excerpt from; The Art of Creative Thinking: 89 Ways to See Things Differently by Rod Judkins

💎 On the power of accountability (to reduce littering)

A writer at out agency, Rob DeCleyn, found another great example of choice architecture in his local paper.

A village in Kent had a problem with litter.

Sweet wrappers, crisp packers, soft drink cans and bottles were strewn all over the streets.

But the local shopkeeper didn’t complain or nag the children.

He just wrote their name on the crisp and sweet packets when they bought them.

That’s all, just the child’s name.

And the litter problem cleared up almost immediately.

That’s choice architecture.

The children could still choose to throw their wrappers in the street.

They didn’t have to put them in the litter bin.

The only difference was that now everyone would know whose litter it was.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott

💎 On the power of expectations to shape our experience of products (you taste what you expect to taste)

Pour a bottle of Gallo into an empty 50-year-old bottle of French Burgundy. Then carefully decant a glass in front of a friend and ask for an opinion.

You taste what you expect to taste.

Blind taste testings of champagne have often ranked inexpensive California brands above French ones. With the labels on, this is unlikely to happen.

You taste what you expect to taste.

Were it not so, there would be no role for advertising at all. Were the average consumer rational instead of emotional, there would be no advertising. At least not as we know it today.

Excerpt from: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries

💎 On reducing anti-social behaviour (by making the alternatives more fun)

[…] in 2004, Preston council in Lancashire started to use boards with a peelable plastic film that could be cleaned every day and announced that the board helped reduce gum litter in the town by nearly 80 per cent. In the first year of their use Luton, Bedfordshire, the boards collected in excess of 75,000 pieces of used gum would otherwise have probably ended up on the pavement.

Excerpt from: One Step Ahead: Notes from the Problem Solving Unit by Stevyn Colgan

💎 On the Illusory Superiority Bias (we’re unduly negative when assessing others)

Second, more generally, we’re unduly negative when assessing others. That is, we suffer from an ‘illusory superiority bias’: we tend to think that we’re better than the average person when considering positive traits. Experiment after experiment has shown we rate our relationship happiness, leadership skills, IQ and popularity higher than those of our peers. Eight in ten of us deem our driving ability to be better than the average. To see how pervasive the illusory superiority bias is, we took a large, representative sample of the population in one of our surveys and asked half of the people what their chances were of being involved in a road accident, as either a road user of pedestrian, in the coming year, and asked the other half what the other’ chances were. There was a big difference. 40% in the first group picked the lowest probability option, while only 24% in the second group picked that option for others.

Excerpt from: The Perils of Perception Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy

💎 On how constraints can inspire (rather than hinder creativity)

Dr Seuss’s editors bet him he couldn’t write a book with a limit of only fifty different words. Dr Seuss won the bet and in the process produced one of the highest-selling children’s books of all time Green Eggs and Ham. Van Gogh used a maximum of six colours when waiting. Picasso focused on one colour during his Blue Period. They imposed these limitations on themselves. They needed a framework, but it was their framework, one that suited them.

Excerpt from: The Art of Creative Thinking by Rod Judkins

💎 On the danger of uncritically listening to claimed data (you’ll be misled)

If Rudder’s study hunted at lying, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyle (NATSAL) categorically confirms it. The survey, conducted among 15,000 respondents by UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is the gold standard of research. In 2010 it found that British heterosexual women admit to a mean of eight sexual partners, compared to twelve for men. The difference is logically impossible. If everyone is telling the truth the mean for each gender must be the same.

All of this foes to show that advertisers trying to understand their customers have a problem: if they listen uncritically to consumers, they’ll be misled.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On winning back productive time (by banning talk of bike sheds)

“Bike-shedding” comes from a story by C. Northcote Parkinson (he of Parkinson’s Law). He tells the tale of a committee that has to approve the plans for a nuclear power station. Since they know very little about nuclear power stations they talk about it briefly and then just approve the recommendation put in front of them. Next they have to approve the plans for a bike shed. They all know about bike sheds. They’ve all seen one and used one. So they talk about the bike shed for hours, arguing about construction methods and paint choice and everything. This is why bike-shedding is also known as The Law of Triviality: “members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues”. I’m sure this observation is familiar to you. Most branding conversations seem, to me, to be one long bike-shedding session. It’s not so terrible, it’s human nature. The difference is that software people have identified and named the pattern. That naming is an organisational hack that allows them to break out of it and get on with something more useful. (See also: Fredkin’s Paradox)

Excerpt from: The Marketing Society print title Market Leader

💎 On how poorly set targets lead to unintended consequences (Dead Sea scrolls to company boards)

In 1947, when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, archaeologists set a finder’s fee for each new parchment. Instead of lots of extra scrolls being found, they were simply torn apart to increase the reward. Similarly, in China in the nineteenth century, an incentive was offered for finding dinosaur bones. Farmers located a few on their land, broke them into pieces and cashed in. Modern incentives are no better: company boards promise bonuses for achieved targets. And what happens? Managers invest more energy in trying to lower the targets than in growing the business.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On price cutting being the crack cocaine of business (you will all too quickly get hooked)

Like it or not, price cutting is the crack cocaine of business. You’re both the junkie and the dealer. Like any drug, the insanely addictive short-term high will momentarily camouflage the long-term effects of underselling your product. And you will all too quickly get hooked. Your price-cutting habit will rapidly spiral out of control. Cut costs, make it cheaper, cut costs, make it cheaper. You’ll be trying to save money on production. Reducing the quality of your product, cutting corners, until you’ll eventually be cutting your own business’s throat. And then the slow truth of this self-induced vicious cycle dawns: you can’t make it any cheaper. You’ve slashed it until you have no margin left. And you’ve dumbed down your mission to boot. Game over, dude, all because you became a discount hobo.

Excerpt from: Business for Punks: Break All the Rules – the BrewDog Way by James Watt

💎 On the power of traditional brand identities (the Spirit of Ecstasy)

The Spirit of Ecstasy wasn’t an original Rolls Royce feature. The fashion was to have your own emblem made to personalise your vehicle. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, John Walter Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, asked his friend Sykes, recently graduated from London’s Royal College of Art to design his mascot, and it’s believed to have been modelled on his secretary, mistress and love of his life, Eleanor Velasco Thornton.

Charles Sykes described it as “a graceful little goddess, the Spirit of Ecstasy, who has selected road travel as her supreme and alighted on the prow of a Rolls-Royce motor car to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies.“

When Rolls Royce noticed that some personal mascots did not reflect their vision of their beautiful vehicles, they commissioned Sykes to manufacture the Spirit of Ecstasy for them.

Now it’s 100 years old and a huge part of their brand identity. At times designers must have been tempted to modernise it, but apart from a smaller version for sports cars and the US “Flying Lady” it stays the same.

Excerpt from: 100 Great Branding Ideas (100 Great Ideas) by Sarah McCartney

💎 On how we tend to overestimate the number of people who share our views (we like to think we’re in the popular majority)

Stanford psychologist Lee Ross hit upon this in 1977. He fashioned a sandwich board emblazoned with the slogan ‘Eat at Joe’s’ and asked randomly selected students to wear it around campus for thirty minutes. They also had to estimate how many other students would put themselves forward for the task. Those who declared themselves willing to wear the sign assumed that the majority (62%) would also agree to it. On the other hand, those who politely refused believed that most people (67%) would find it too stupid to undertake. In both cases, the students imagined themselves to be in the popular majority.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On social loafing reducing the effectiveness of teams (why teams are lazy)

In 1913 Maximilian Ringelmann, a French engineer, studied the performance of horses. He concluded that the power of two animals pulling a coach did not equal twice the power of a single horse. Surprised by this result, he extended his research to humans. He had several men pull a rope and measured the force applied by each individual. On average, if two people were pulling together, each invested just 93% of their individual strength, when three pulled together, it was 85%, and with eight people, just 49%.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On knowing your place (Do you know who I am?)

It’s an American agency called Wundermann.

Apparently, one day the owner flew in to visit his agency.

He was a big, brash New Yorker.

He drove straight into the car park below the building.

The gruff cockney parking attendant stopped him.

He said, ‘Where you going, guv?’

The American was indignant.

He said, ‘I’m parking, of course.’

The parking attendant said, ‘You gotta permit?’

The American said, ‘No.’

The parking attendant said, ‘Then you ain’t parking here.’

The American was outraged.

He said, ‘Do you know who I am?’

The parking attendant shook his head and said, ‘No.’

The American got out of the car, raised himself up to his full height, tapped his chest and said, ‘I’m Wundermann.’

The parking attendant said, ‘I don’t care if you’re fucking Superman. You ain’t parking here’

Excerpt from: Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-Thinking the Competition by Dave Trott

💎 On avoiding potentially negative celebrity association (of Jersey Shore)

And that is what Abercrombie & Fitch was worried about when it saw “The Situation” wearing their clothes on Jersey Shore. Their press release stated:

We are deeply concerned that Mr. Sorrentino’s association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image. We understand that the show is for entertainment purposes, but believe this association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans. We have therefore offered a substantial payment to Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino and the producers of MTVs The Jersey Shore to have the character wear an alternate brand. We have also extended this offer to other members of the cast, and are urgently awaiting a response.

Companies are usually overjoyed when celebrities wear their clothes. But Abercrombie was worried about what would happen if the wrong celebrities started wearing the brand.

Excerpt from: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

💎 On adding unneeded complexity and jargon ruining a piece of writing (consideration of contemporary phenomena)

From Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell’s version goes:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Excerpt from: On Writing Well by William Zinsser

💎 On advertisers’ biggest decision being how much to spend (rather than how it’s spent)

Everybody who’s written anything half-way useful about adverting has agreed that the most important decision a client company makes about advertising is the decision to advertise in the first place. The difference to a company’s long-term prosperity between advertising and not advertising is infinitely greater than any decision it might make between two alternative creative approaches or two competing advertising agencies.

But that, of course, is a very generic point of view. And agencies like all competitive brands, have little to gain from generic truths.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore