Espresso: Rory Sutherland's Favourite Dumb Questions to Unlock HUGE Growth

0:02What are some of those questions linking this back to dumb smart answers line dumb questions because I know in your book, Alchemy, you've got that list of like nine things. It's like you can't solve solving problems with logic. It's like trying to play golf with one golf club or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I would argue. I would argue you need you need. What are some of your favorite dumb questions, Ori? I mean, some of them would be simply, what are we trying to do here? Really? What does what? And then really the operative work. So the point I'm making about defining something, which is it is considered in engineering and economics circles perfectly acceptable to define a train journey between London and Manchester, say, in the case of HS2, by capacity, speed, time, an entirely economic model around time savings and the value of the connections you create.

0:59I would argue that if you went to Disney they'd ask a different question which is actually what we're trying to do here is to get more people to travel to Manchester ideally or from London possibly less vice versa we can all debate that we want to connect the two major cities but in order to do that what we want people to do is to prefer to go by train than my car and the Disney question would be So the Disney question would not be how fast does the train need to be? How many people does it need to carry? What does it need to cost? The Disney question would be how do we make the train journey between London and Manchester so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car?

1:41OK, now that's a much more open ended question, which is why bureaucrats don't like it. Because solving that problem requires imagination and it presents you with a list of different options and a large solution set from which you have to make decisions. often involving incommensurable variables, which therefore means you can't use a model, you've got to actually use subjective judgment. And bureaucrats are terrified of using subjective judgment. So they'll fall back on a bad decisive model with a single right answer, rather than an interesting creative model, which gives rise to multiple answers, multiple interesting answers.

2:19And then another question might be, well, if the entire purpose of our 120 billion pound investment is to get people from the centre of London to the centre of Manchester okay then yes a train is probably the right answer but is there a way in which we could spend 120 billion on transport infrastructure okay which solves which actually creates far more economic value for far more people because it is only a small percentage in any one day in London, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get to Manchester fast. And in any day in Manchester, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get from central Manchester to London fast.

3:00In fact, it's slightly stupid because most of the people who actually live, sorry, most of the people who work in Manchester, okay, actually live south of Manchester. Yeah. Okay. So currently, they don't board the train in Manchester. They board the train in... It's probably Southport, is it? No, Southport's one. Stockport, Stockport, Stockport. Yeah. Sorry, Stockport. So they drive south to Stockport and board the train there because you're not going to go into the office and then take a train to London. You're probably going to get on the train first thing in the morning. So it's very annoying travelling in the wrong direction.

3:32This is why I go nuts that bloody Eurostar doesn't stop at Ebsfleet and Ashford, because every time I go to Paris, I'm going to go to Ebsfleet, travel 17 minutes in the wrong direction, then spend 40 minutes being corralled in a hideous waiting area. okay now ironically this is a classic example okay they are really worried about how crowded the Eurostar waiting area is at St Pancras and it's an obstacle it's hideous it's an obstacle so they claim I mean even the lounge is ridiculous that'd be a bottleneck okay that's a bottleneck okay now okay right and they claim perhaps conveniently that it's an obstacle to running more services so we would like to add services obviously to German Germany there's a potential of an overnight service somewhere.

4:19But we'd like to add more services to more destinations, to the Eurostar, certainly including, they've done Amsterdam, admittedly, but you could certainly include some other places in Germany. I don't know, where would we, I would guess, Cologne. Okay, so what you're going to try and do is take over more space from St Pancras Station or do enormously expensive building work. There is a solution that probably costs about£20 ,000 to implement, which is you do a deal with High Speed One, which simply says, if you're a leisure traveller, particularly, and you're travelling to Paris or Brussels, you can save£10, OK, if you take the High Speed One to Ebb's fleet and board the Eurostar Ebb's fleet, where there is an enormous great waiting area and a really cushy lounge, or indeed Ashford, OK?

5:08Can you actually go from there? If you got 20 % to 30%, 20 % of the people, you'd have to stop the trains there. Okay, but that's physically possible. Or if you simply educated people and made it possible to board at Epps Fleet. I had friends who lived in Greenwich who always went to Epps Fleet to board the Eurostar. Where's Epps Fleet? Epps Fleet's in Kent. Epps Fleet's in Kent. It's just south of the Thames, just outside the M25, basically. Now, just to be clear, the population of Essex is 1.8 million. The population of Kent is 1.8 million. East Sussex is probably 600 ,000. Surrey is probably 600 ,000.

5:43OK, a lot of those, and East London would be another million. OK, a lot of those people, and South East London as well, a lot of those people would much prefer to go to Ebsfleet, park the car and take the train, than they would go into St Pancras and then travel in the wrong direction and then go through a ludicrous sort of one man and his dog kept in the holding pen boarding procedure. Why they don't, by the way, let you board the train a bit earlier rather than holding you back and then forcing you all to board at the last minute. There are lots and lots of ways you could solve that problem of overcrowding without making the space bigger.

6:15You change behaviour instead. Engineering solutions are calculable and deterministic and therefore appeal to the human left brain. Psychological and behavioural interventions are much, much cheaper, but they are to some extent probabilistic and harder to predict. two months free yeah that's what espresso sponsors unleashed are offering they are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your econ and accounting software it's helped islands cut admin time in half get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability brands like candy kittens tarquins gin minor figures and trip all use Unleashed and I reckon you should too as I said two months free in the show notes click there and you're going to get two months for free