Transcription
You should read good detective fiction because it teaches you a lot about how to have an insight. Book number one would be "The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle," specifically the Sherlock Holmes short stories. In fact, and for several reasons. I mean, first of all, uh, although he's not considered a serious figure in literature, uh, Doyle is an absolutely masterful prose writer. So if you want to learn to work to write clearly and to think clearly as a consequence of writing clearly, it's a fantastic example.
A few literati, like Kingsley Amis, for example, did actually point to the fact that many people from that era, uh, you know, if you think about it, it's kind of late Victorian, Edwardian era, are painful to read to modern English readers. He's not. There's a bigger reason, which is that you should read good detective fiction because it teaches you a lot about how to have an insight. I think there are very interesting kind of parallels between creative work, if you like, of any kind, detective work, and perhaps humor.
Would be a third, would be a third characteristic. All three of them possess some really useful kind of, they're almost sort of practice runs for having a use, useful insight in a commercial sense. Uh, you know, there's the comedic skill of spotting something that nobody else has spotted, and that also occurs in crime fiction. Um, and it also teaches you that actually, surprisingly trivial things, anecdotal things, tiny little anomalies can be of huge importance.
One of the worst things, I think, you can have as a detective, and one of the worst things, I think, you can have in, um, in our own business, is a, is a sense of proportion. In other words, if you're the kind of person who gets really, really annoyed if people start talking about small things or anecdotes or anomalies or outliers because you want to focus on the average, okay? Um, you're the wrong kind of person for this job.
And so, actually, if you don't want to read those, read any kind of crime fiction, or read true-life crime, or watch YouTube documentaries on how they catch serial killers. It doesn't really matter. But I think there's something quite important there, which is that if you look at good police work, it starts out with, um, an investigative phase. Now, eventually, you have to prove your case in court, but there's an investigative phase which precedes the evidential phase.
Now, in the investigative phase, you may make use of, "Did anybody notice anything unusual?" "The Peculiar Incident of the Dog in the Night-time." That's from a Sherlock Holmes short story called, uh, "The Adventure of Silver Blaze." Uh, the point was the dog didn't do anything in the night-time, which was the peculiar incident, and it suggested that the crime, with spoiler alert, was an inside job. But because if anybody had broken into the stables to steal the racehorse, the dog would have been expected to bark or make some sort of noise. And, you know, that's a beautiful example of spotting an asymmetric insight, the absence of something rather than the presence of something.
And so, you know, in any case, get involved in crime because it's enjoyable. Um, and it's an enjoyable way to understand the process. Now, ultimately, this is where I think we get it wrong. We want to start with the data, and we want to start with things with evidential value. We want to start with hard facts. If you're trying to find out an ultimate truth, you won't be presented with that data to begin with. You have to go and find it.
And quite often, the thing that leads to the capture of a major criminal is a surprisingly trivial-seeming chance observation. So, the Yorkshire Ripper, famously, well, I mean, Son of Sam was caught, I think, because he got a parking ticket. Um, and somebody remembered seeing a traffic warden, and they just wondered whether the perpetrator might have been given a parking ticket. Sure enough, he had been, and they went along to check on him, and before they went into to question him, they looked in the car, and they basically saw a load of guns and loony notes in the back of the car. They thought, "Okay, this may not be a completely wasted visit here."
In the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, two of the cops, one of the decisive moments was they spotted that he parked his car, the, the wrong way round. And this is because in the Bradford red-light district, apparently, not a habitué, um, people normally park with their windscreen facing the wall, so nobody can see what's back going on in the back seat. Uh, in his case, he'd parked the other way around, as if to make a quick getaway, which was indeed what he was planning. And they remembered this fact, and they went back and investigated, and sure enough, found that he dropped a, a hammer and a screwdriver, uh, in the bushes while he was urinating, um, just before they arrested him. And now that's evidential.
Now, okay, but actually, you've got to go through a kind of mount of uncertainty, and you've also got to, in, you've got to avoid becoming fixated on a few particular data points because they may not be true. The other case with the Yorkshire was they were convinced he had a Geordie accent because someone was sending in fake tape recordings. And actually, you have to be prepared to let go of certain things in this process of investigation. As I said, I'm not against data, I'm not against evidence. You can't bang someone up for 40 years for parking in a funny way, okay? But those little things, they don't give you solid proof that you're right, but they tell you what to investigate next and where to direct your attention next.
Next book I'd recommend would be "Obvious Adams" by Robert Updegraff, which is a book of about 60 pages, which you can read in a single sitting. Uh, it was published in something like 1914 or '16 or something, and it's, uh, subtitled, "Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman." Actually, detail someone who works in advertising, funnily enough, but he doesn't actually do any advertising. He, his value to the business community is again in noticing things.
Um, in a sense, um, when I was given this book, I was just appointed as Ogilvy's creative director, and I was given a copy by Mike Walsh, who was the chairman of Ogilvy Europe at the time. And I was a bit insulted because it looked like a hokey kind of American business self-help book, which is exactly what it is, by the way. But it's still in print, and for a very, very good reason, which is that it's a very, very good guide to creativity through observation. And, um, it was, funny enough, one of David Ogilvy's favorite books. I didn't realize that. That's probably why Mike Walsh gave it to me.
I was kind of insulted because I thought, you know, I've just been made creative director, you should be giving me a subscription to the Harvard Business Review or The Economist, and instead, you've got me this hokey Edwardian business book. And I kind of put it on the shelves in a bit of a huff until, I think possibly for a trip to the loo, I just grabbed it one day and started reading it. And indeed, for the first two pages, I thought, "This is a hokey business book." But by the time I'd finished, I realized it was brilliant.
There are moments of epiphany. Um, and I, the, the problem I have in recommending a, a behavioral science book is that I can't remember entirely where, which one led to my epiphany. There was a very good one by a guy called, I think, Pete Lunn, if I'm right, which might have been the first one I read. Um, let me go and, uh, research this, actually. He's, I think he's an Irish or, or maybe a British behavioral scientist resident in Ireland. And, um, uh, there's also a book, there's a book by someone called Stuart Sutherland called "Irrationality," which was very good. But I can't recommend him because he's a fairly member of the Sutherland family. He's no relation, by the way.
I got a vague idea that Pete, Pete, uh, Pete Lunn's book was called "Basic Instincts: Human Nature and the New Economics," and that might have been the first book I read that actually gave me the kind of, "Wow, this is really fascinating." I, I've got a vague memory, I was ill, that I was ill with flu for about a week. I started reading some very good economics books, and I read various, um, uh, there's "The Armchair Economist" by a guy called Steven Landsburg. And I fundamentally had a kind of reading binge because with the flu, I wasn't well enough to do anything else, and I found it, um, absolutely fascinating. So that's Pete Lunn, who I think probably deserves a plug for that book, so I'll make that number three.
It sits with an awful lot of behavioral economics books, but the reason I, the reason I give it quite a lot of prominence is I think it was the first one I read, and that was the one which was, in a sense, decisive in my thinking because it suggested it was the first time I'd been introduced to behavioral economics with a suggestion that actually, as I'd always suspected, I was fascinated by economics because it was such an elegant theory, but I'd also worked in advertising long enough to know that it made ludicrous assumptions about human motivation, symmetry of information, perfect trust, you know, the stuff, okay?
I was also, I also knew enough about reality to know that these were not safe assumptions to make in any kind of real-world setting outside the model. Um, they struck me as just almost irresponsible. Now, nonetheless, I found, you know, the whole thing extremely elegant. Um, you know, economics, and it is elegant, and by the way, sometimes it's useful. There are occasions where it's very useful. But the idea that it's necessarily the best idea you can have is the one that makes the most economic sense strikes me as fundamentally dangerous and wrong-headed.
And then the F, the fourth book, I will go on to the fourth book. The fourth book is, I'm going to be anomalous here, and it's actually, and I don't expect everybody to take it up. Um, there is, oh, sorry, it is say, a book of Times or Telegraph cryptic crosswords. It could be Sudoku if you really hate cryptic crosswords. Or in America, they don't really have cryptic crosswords. They have them in Canada, Australia, New Zealand. They exist in Hebrew and in Polish, I think, but they're very big in India. In fact, the Times of India has a very, very good cryptic crossword, but they don't seem to exist in the United States. So apologies for you, uh, if there are any American listeners.
But it's very interesting because it's yet, it effectively teaches you quite a lot about creative insight generation, which I suppose is sort of the gig I'm in at the moment. Many of us are. And partly because the clue always has an ostensible surface meaning, which is a distraction. Reading the sentence literally will not help you solve that, okay? What you have to do is break it up unusually into one part of the clue, which is a homonym or synonym for what the answer is, and the other part which defines it cryptically.
So that, for example, in a crossword clue, you might read the word "does." Now, you immediately read that as "does," okay? And all, everything in your brain is saying it's "does." Okay? Now, the actual answer to that is "does" because D-O-E-S in that particular context means "does," the plural of "doe," a deer, a female deer. So that's the cryptic part of the, of the thing, which, and effectively, it's like an equation. So the first half is effectively the definition of the word that's, that's the answer, and the second one is the cryptic constituency of that particular word.
And, um, the reason I think this is so useful is for several reasons. One of which is it teaches you to continually, if you like, reframe the question. It's a very, very good exercise in saying, "Well, we've been asked to do this, but does it really mean this? Or actually, why are we really doing this?" It's a bit like the Dominic Cummings recommendation to ask why six times. When somebody says, "We're going to, you know, reduce train unpunctuality across the Southern region," you don't just go, "Yeah, great idea." You go, "Why?" And then you go, "Why again?" And only after about five or six whys do you get actually close to the real reason, and then you can debate whether it's actually a good idea or not. And so it's that business of seeing beneath the surface.
I do, I do a cryptic crossword probably every day. I try to. But there's another thing about it, too, and this is equally important, which is what it teaches you about the best way to approach problems. For example, this is just one example. Very commonly, you will be completely baffled by a clue to a point of just complete bamboozlement, and you'll go away, make a cup of tea, distract yourself, go and do something else, and you'll come back, and the answer is apparent within five seconds.
So it teaches you one of the things which I think is a creative tip, which is, in a weird way, you think the way to solve a problem, because we've been taught this is the kind of worthy, protestant way to solve a problem, is to apply yourself very, very diligently to the problem. But actually, with crossword solving, it's the art of distracting yourself that actually, if you're stuck, the very thing you should not do is persevere.
And so there's a very particular kind of mindset which loves to start work early, start work straight away, keep on plowing on in the same direction, no kind of recursion, no deviation, um, just stick focused on the task and do not let up. Keep your mind nose to the grindstone, okay? Which seems like a very moral and correct, efficient approach, and won't get you into any trouble at work. But it's actually a very, very bad behavior if you're trying to solve a problem imaginatively, or indeed, you know, effectively.
Because there, there are two parts of life, okay? There's what, there's the literal part, part of life, where what makes sense is also what makes, makes most sense is most likely to work. And there are areas of engineering and physics and chemistry and so on, which effectively fulfill those requirements. And then there's a large part of life where actually what works and what makes sense may be quite divergent. The thing that makes the most sense may not work all that well.
And the problem with those areas of life is that if you pretend that second class of problem belongs to the first class of problem, and you basically act as though this is a quest for, um, you know, a rational solution to the problem, um, based simply on sequential logic, you will look like a really good person, dedicated to solving the problem. You'll never get criticized. I think an awful lot of protest, uh, is actually counterproductive. All right, you think you're signaling that you care about the problem. Act, actually, in many ways, what you're doing may be losing support for your case, okay?
And so what I think is vital about cryptic crosswords is it's a very good exploration both into the, um, into the, I suppose you say, the habits of thought that you need in order to crack problems where the literal approach is effectively likely to fail. In fact, the worst thing you can do with a cryptic crossword is read it, read it literally. Because, and of course, it's very, it's very interesting with market research, because it's the whole question of, kind of, "Okay, this is what they're ostensibly saying. This is what they really mean." You know, it's that kind of thing.
I mean, an interesting one, if you want the modern version of "Obvious Adams," and you end actually with a film recommendation, which is "The Big Short." And the reason I recommend that film is because, of course, there were lots and lots of people who had lots and lots of self-serving theories about collateralized debt obligations and, you know, synthetic CDOs and whatever, okay? What distinguished, not all, but most of the most of the team is they went to, they went and looked. They went to Florida and looked at what was really happening in the housing market. And, you know, they went to Vegas and they looked at the extraordinary kind of overabundance of the people involved in the business, and they realized there was a floor. But they noticed things that other people didn't notice or didn't want to see.