Studio Non Troppo

In Seth Godin’s post today, he uses an example of a fuel conservation problem to illustrate the practical limitations and pitfalls of coming across logic (in this case, arithmetic):

A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

• Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
• Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it’s more than twice as good a move).

We’re not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive.

I’ll focus on the “trick question” part and leave the math to the reader (Seth also includes a couple links in his post with demonstrations of the arithmetic.)

In all likelihood, the best answer to the problem would be c) none of the above. Replacing the Suburbans with 50 mpg Priuses – or even with cars that get just 20 miles per gallon – would be far better than either of the alternatives. And that’s obviously only one of many alternatives, including radical ones such as “walk!” These aren’t answers Seth is unaware of; he was just making his point about arithmetic, confusion, and deception.

The point I want to make in this post is this:

Optimizing a bad choice rarely gets you ahead of where you could be if you made a better choice.

Having something work out the right way is not a matter of the thing.

As Malcolm Gladwell would put it in Outliers, it’s not just a lot of hard work that made Bill Gates more wealthy than 99.9999999% of the other people in the world. Nor was it his smarts. No, those things were necessary for his off-the-charts success, but they were not sufficient. It also took a constellation of opportunities, huge and irreplicable opportunities (though not necessarily evident as such at the time) for his hard work and smarts to pay off in such an over-the-top way.

When developing a product, say, for example, a bar of soap, it is absolutely critical to recognize that the nature of the new soap is not the key to its success in the marketplace.

The bar of soap simply does not exist on its own. It is tied, inextricably, to the particular marketing plan you attach to it. And to the time (the specific time, not just the time of day or time of year) in which it is released. And to the words you use when you describe your pet project to your friends. And to the global contingencies of soap manufacturing processes today, the day you email companies for production bids. Think the butterfly effect, smushed down to a world of implications in an instant.

There is no such thing as a bar of soap, separate from the myriad details necessary to imagine, design, create, sell, and use that bar of soap.

It’s so complicated, really, that it’s almost miraculous that any particular bar-of-soap idea succeeds. Richard Feynman talked once about how miraculous it seemed that of all the possible license plate numbers in the world, he just happened to see ARW 357 one morning. (Think about that, and feel the delightful discomfort in your mind. He was talking about how some things we consider miracles are examples of an outside-in way of looking at things that are equivalently, but differently and beautifully weird when we look at them from the inside out.)

Catching a wave is absurdly unlikely, and it’s easy to credit wave-catching surfers with superhuman skills. But it’s not that. It’s time on task, luck, sequences of opportunities, a willingness to keep playing with configurations. Aside from mental spin and Taoism, success is neither within our power nor outside of our power.

Everything, logic included, is necessary but not sufficient.

Isn’t that grand?

Photo: TravOC

In surfing, catching a wave requires being in the right place at the right time.

As a beginning surfer, I marveled at how exhausting all the paddling was: paddling out through the break, paddling to try to catch the wave, paddling back in to position after missing the wave. The really good surfers never seemed to work as hard to get up on a wave, though. They spent most of their time looking out to sea, watching for waves. (I never did learn how to read the water that way. The undulations I thought would become good waves didn’t.) Then they would gently paddle into position. (Why there? How do they know to go there?, I thought).

And then, while everyone else paddled furiously in vain efforts to catch the wave, the real surfers would make one, two vigorous strokes and be up.

Catching a wave requires one to be in the right place at the right time. It also requires a wave.