Espresso: Rory Sutherland - The Fatal Mistake of Being Too Process Driven

0:02Mozart was a natural talent who could effectively compose almost on the fly. Beethoven was more considered and laborious. OK, it wasn't, in other words, you know, he had deep wells, but they required slightly more drilling. OK, now, you know, I mean, you could make, I mean, no one knows whether this is true. I mean, I have no idea where it comes from even. But it's said of Shakespeare that he wrote without blotting a word. Now, if that is true. Blotting a word. So in other words, no emendation. You just sat down and you wrote, you basically wrote immortal prose line after line. without going back, crossing out, going, you know, lettuce crossed out cauliflower.

0:48OK, right, OK, whatever. OK, shall I compare thee to a, you know, summer holiday? No, OK, right. Now, if that's true, that's genuinely remarkable. I think there are people like that. I think there are equally valuable people for whom it's just going to be a bit more work. I don't think it's actually, you could, Do you say that one person is more talented than the other? Well, it's only really worth judging talent by its output. Yeah. There are other people. Fascinatingly, probably one of the most interesting creative lives is Rossini, who was very, very lazy, apparently. Who's Rossini? Composer, opera mostly, but lots of other things.

1:29Barbara of Seville, who basically at a certain age just got rich enough that they couldn't be bothered anymore. But literally, he'd done his compositions. I think he'd made enough money. but for whatever reason seems to have just given up for i think later in life he actually returned but but i mean you'll also have people who do that you know that was like da vinci because that was the dirty guys he was reading his book about um biography walt risings on da vinci and basically what da vinci would drive people up the fucking wall because his his whole thing was output so it's essentially like what we're doing today it was basically work smart not hard he'd go really intense for four hours and then do fuck all and they'd be like oh why and he would take these massive long rests.

2:09Of course, that's a weird facet, isn't it, of ADD or ADHD, which is that people with ADHD, unexpectedly, you might think, are also capable of incredibly intense bouts of concentration. So it's a slightly different way of directing your energies. It doesn't suggest that you're necessarily a sort of dilettante or totally easily distracted, although you might be it may well be that you need the distraction well rick rubin procrastination is not distraction just sorry distraction is not procrastination yeah absolutely right distraction's great because that's where so i've got this another great um we're talking about quentin tarantino's writing process changed when he did inglorious bastards she basically used to sit there and write in a cafe pulp fiction eat hamburgs eat fries in sort of this you know cafe in America and he would try and bang out eight, ten hours a day and he basically fucked that off and he would do four hours intense work.

3:12And are you sure for someone to change method? he says all his films after Inglourious Barsas got better and then he'd go and sit and this is why I've got this idea between hard creativity and soft creativity so I'll tell you about that in a sec but then he'd go and sit in the swimming pool and he'd basically say I'd sit there and basically by distraction is not procrastination. All these new ideas for his script would come and then he'd spend a little 20 minutes writing them down and then the next day he'd start again so he had all this fresh material to... One reason I support a degree of flexible working is that there's a surprising value to getting up, turning off your computer and stacking the dishwasher because it's always said of Archimedes that he had that idea, you know Archimedes getting in the bath, the idea of displacement of water.

3:57And, of course, people always say he had the idea in the bath, but he actually had the idea of getting into the bath. Yeah. Okay, and I think it's important because in the transition between one mental state and another, it's a bit like briefly your brain goes into neutral, rather like when you change gear in an old-fashioned petrol car. And in that moment of going into neutral, something might happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. And I think the very interesting thing, by the way, a great book to read, which is sort of about an interesting kind of creativity, but it undoubtedly is creativity.

4:36There's a book, I think, called Counterintelligence, which I've just been reading, which is a kind of history of GCHQ and Bletchley Park. So that's the government's communication headquarters and kind of code breaking and crypto analysis and traffic analysis. So it's a bunch of spooks in Cheltenham, basically, listening in on everybody, mostly electronics, intelligence gathering, but also intelligence analysis and prioritisation and so on. So it's an intelligence function, I think, which reports to probably the secret intelligence service. I don't know the structure. And it sprang out of, to an extent, a thing called Bletchley Park, which you've probably seen.

5:14What's better, I mean, it reminds me of those ITV functions. OK, so the film with Alan Turing and the Enigma breaking. Oh, Imitation Game. Code breaking in World War II, the Imitation Game. That's basically about it. OK. And what was interesting about both Bletchley Park, which they have continued in GCHQ, is you have a very non-hierarchical organisation. In many cases, they'll hire someone not to a specific role. They'll hire someone who's mentally unusual and then find a role for them subsequently, rather than the usual way in which we hire now, which is we must define the role before we hire the person.

5:48They do that backwards. It also has some really, really unusual characteristics in terms of how it's sort of self-organising, how it's very, very flat in terms of structure. And so it's unusual as a government department in the way in which it's surprisingly non-linear in the way it manages people. And this goes back to Bletchley Park, which was a deeply eccentric organisation. How so? Well, it was actually one of the things that's probably forgotten far too much. What year was this? So this would have been, roughly speaking... This is the Enigma Code. Yeah, so Churchill basically was a big fan of intelligence and spying in a way that Hitler wasn't.

6:27And that was probably decisive in a way, that Hitler believed that his own military strategy was so brilliant, OK, that you didn't really need to know what the enemy was up to that much. and they were overconfident in the extent to which the Enigma code was unbreakable. In Bletchley Park, which had an extraordinary mix of people, as I said, probably 75 % female, involved in everything from obviously translating from German into English, but generally involved in code-breaking and crypto-analysis, what you need there is not the standard structure that a command and control organization needs because rather like police detective work you're in the business of spotting significance or pattern recognition and so it's a fatal mistake to try and practice that by being too dirigiste or directional more more effectively defining success in advance is how i describe In other words in a way when you start it up and out in a police investigation Eventually, you'll have to prove the guy's guilty.

7:40That's what I call the evidential phase of police work Okay, but in finding out who did it in the first place before you get to prove it You have to be very very open-minded about from where the insight might come could be DNA analysis could is I was saying Okay, and so it's a fatal mistake to be too process driven or to too tied down to procedural neatness in any process, and I'd include creative advertising in this, by the way, as a kind of weird bastard stepchild of Bletchley Park. What you're trying to do is make a breakthrough. And just as scientific breakthroughs rarely emerge from pure intention, they're accidental observations.

8:22I mean, to what extent this was actually imagined for the film, The Imitation Game. But that insight, which is code-breaking, is very difficult if we don't know what we're looking for. But if 90 people end their message with Heil Hitler, or if everybody always keys in the first five characters as the name of their girlfriend, code-breaking becomes a lot easier because we know what we're to expect. Now, that was positioned as the kind of, you know, flash of insight in to what extent that's true. I genuinely don't know. It's plausible, by the way. There was certainly one very valuable German who they didn't want to.

9:08They were absolutely desperate that this chap didn't get attacked because every single day he was in some absolute bloody middle of nowhere posting in the middle of the desert. in North Africa. And every single day he would post exactly the same thing, which was nothing to report in so-and-so, so-and-so. And, of course, that meant code-breaking for the Enigma machine became incredibly easy because you knew exactly what he was actually saying. You just had to find out the combination of dials that would actually lead to this outcome. Two months free. Yeah, that's what Espresso sponsors Unleashed are offering.

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