Rory Sutherland – Are We Now Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? | Nudgestock 2024

creator | channel

Abstract

A 31-minute conference talk delivered to a live audience of marketers, opening on an old trade joke about the account man who spends his wish undoing his colleagues' because he has a meeting in two and a half hours. The urgent drowning the important, and ruining it for everyone else — and the rest of the talk is that pattern traced through speed, measurement and persuasion.

• The return on going faster collapses long before anyone stops chasing it: the same increment on the dial buys ten minutes low down and one minute high up.
• Ranking options by the one measurable variable reads as neutrality and quietly deletes everything valuable on another axis.
• Procedures exist to absorb blame, which is why human psychology is the first thing any model deletes.
• Every time saving is absorbed as a new expectation, and every option hardens into an obligation once enough people adopt it.
• The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea, because meaning rather than magnitude carries the value.
• Where the process is what was bought, compressing it does not deliver the same good sooner — it removes the good.

For someone whose brand is one person, the talk lands close to home: every tension in it — speed against value, the measurable against the judged, the process against the deliverable — runs inside a single head. There is no finance department to veto the slower option, no model whose integrity has to be protected, no committee needing an answer nobody can argue with. The hedge a company buys with procedure is unavailable, and the licence to choose the inefficient, costly, human channel is total.

Chapter summaries

01:18 - Urgency drowns importance, and the cost lands on people who never chose it

Urgency drowns importance, and the cost lands on people who never chose it.

"I want those two guys back I've got an important meeting in two and a half hours"

— 01:18

The short-term consideration always has a deadline attached and the long-term one has no advocate, so the contest is settled before it starts. The urgent wins by default rather than on merit, and the people who pay are the ones who were never asked.

02:29 - The return on going faster collapses once the speed is already comfortable

The return on going faster collapses as speed rises, so past a comfortable threshold the optimising stops paying.

"whereas the numbers around the outside are completely regular the"

— 02:40

Time per fixed distance is the reciprocal of speed, so equal increments on the dial buy steeply unequal minutes. The same increment that saved about ten minutes low down saves about one higher up — an order of magnitude rather than a measurement — while the risk incurred and imposed keeps rising in a straight line.

04:53 - Ranking by the measurable variable passes as neutrality and deletes the options people want

Ranking options by the measurable variable passes as neutrality, and quietly deletes the options people actually want.

"it fascinates me that all rail um ticket buying applications basically assume that you're in a hurry it's kind of odd right maybe you want to save money instead"

— 04:53

An optimiser surfaces only what it was told to rank on, so anything valuable on a different axis becomes invisible rather than rejected. A cheaper and pleasanter route exists and stays hidden unless the traveller already knows to name the detour, which means the ranking is doing the choosing.

06:37 - The brief decides the answer, so the discipline it goes to decides what gets built

The brief decides the answer, so the discipline it is handed to determines what gets built.

"what would happen if you hadn't given the brief to a lead of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed time distance capacity"

— 06:37

Each profession rewrites an open question into the closed one it knows how to solve, so the brief effectively decides the answer before anyone starts work. Handed to engineers a transport question becomes speed and capacity; handed elsewhere it becomes how to make the journey enjoyable enough that driving looks foolish.

07:12 - Closing down the solution space buys a defensible answer and costs the good ones

Closing down the solution space buys a defensible answer and costs the good ones.

"why does that question never get asked because it's an open-ended question and business people governments politicians aren't looking to solve problems they're looking to win arguments"

— 07:12

An open question has many right answers and no way to settle an argument, so it gets converted into a single-answer arithmetic problem that nobody can dispute. Winning the argument replaces solving the problem, and the cost is every good answer that was never allowed into the space.

08:17 - A wait is an emotional problem rather than a duration problem

A wait is an emotional problem rather than a duration problem.

"doesn't change how long you wait for the taxi it changes the quality of the weight In Time by reducing uncertainty"

— 08:17

What people dislike about waiting is uncertainty and the absence of trust, neither of which elapsed time measures. Showing the vehicle approaching changes the quality of the wait without shortening it by a second, which is the whole point: the optimisation was aimed at the wrong quantity.

09:24 - Time is not fungible, and the shape of a block matters more than its total

Time is not fungible: the shape of a block matters more than its total.

"there's also the whole question of time that we regard it as a kind of odity as if it's fungible as if 10 time 10 minutes is the same as one chunk of a 100 minutes"

— 09:24

Switching between tasks destroys the usable capacity of a period even when the arithmetic total is unchanged, so ten separate minutes are not a tenth of a hundred. The shape of the block is the thing, and a single known appointment can spoil a whole day around it.

10:05 - Instant messaging moved the sorting of urgency from the sender to every possible recipient

Making messages instantaneous moved the job of sorting urgency from the sender to every possible recipient.

"mistakes we ever made was we made email instantaneous we should have built in a 2-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time sensitive or urgent"

— 10:05

Removing the delay moved the sorting of urgency from the one person who knew it to everyone who might receive it. With nothing declaring itself time-sensitive, each recipient has to poll continuously in case something is — and the cure described is a default rather than individual discipline, because discipline does not scale across an inbox.

10:59 - People often prefer a slower journey, and the preference survives contact with evidence

People often prefer a slower journey, and the preference survives contact with evidence.

"found out in research that quite a lot of people quite a lot of the time actually enjoy commuting"

— 11:10

The preference is for the journey rather than against it, and it survives contact with the evidence. People live slightly further from work than a pure optimiser would, buying a chronological buffer that no model expressed in disutility can represent at all.

11:52 - Optimisation models come to outrank human preference because the investment case rests on them

Optimisation models come to outrank human preference, because the model is what the investment case is built on.

"than they optimally should to create a kind of chronological buffer between where they work and where they live we actually like that that decompression time"

— 11:52

Admitting that slower is sometimes preferred invalidates the model the investment case rests on, so the finding gets suppressed rather than the model revised. The model outranks the preference because the model is what the money is argued through.

12:54 - Procedures exist to absorb blame, which is why psychology is the first thing deleted

Procedures exist to absorb blame, which is why psychology is the first thing a model deletes.

"because if you can reduce decision making to an algorithm or a formula or a process or a procedure okay you avoid the risk of blame"

— 12:54

Reducing a decision to a formula means no choice was made, and therefore nobody can be held responsible for it. Ambiguity is what forces a choice, psychology is where the ambiguity lives, and so psychology is the first thing any model deletes — not because it is wrong but because it is inconvenient.

13:53 - A technology's norms matter more than its invention, and uncoordinated adoption turns it destructive

A technology's norms matter more than its invention, and uncoordinated adoption turns a good tool destructive.

"we've had an extraordinary change with the invention of um video conferencing not so much the invention of it but the normalization of it"

— 13:53

Individually optimal use of a shared technology does not aggregate to a system optimum; to optimise the whole you have to sub-optimise the parts. The norms matter more than the invention, and a technology normalised without any convention about when it is used turns destructive without anyone deciding that it should.

15:46 - Every time saving is absorbed, because arriving faster becomes the expectation rather than leisure

Every time saving gets absorbed, because arriving faster becomes the expectation rather than the leisure.

"people actually said imagine how much Leisure we'll have if we can get to San Francisco in 2 and 1 half days rather than 2 weeks"

— 15:46

An advantage lasts only while the other side is unaware of it. Once the fast route is common knowledge the old pace becomes a failure rather than a courtesy, which is why the leisure everyone expected from every acceleration has never once arrived.

16:58 - A universal behaviour stops being a choice and starts imposing on people who opted out

When a behaviour becomes universal it stops being an individual choice and starts imposing on people who opted out.

"it's worth remembering that when behaviors become Universal they affect everybody"

— 16:58

A norm is not the sum of private decisions; it changes the environment that everyone else is standing in. The people it affects most are not the ones who chose the behaviour, which is exactly what makes the individual-choice defence fail.

18:03 - Acceleration without consultation leaves people unsatisfied, which is why current slogans point backwards

Acceleration without consultation leaves people permanently unsatisfied, which is why current slogans point backwards.

"the acceleration of things has in a way made us miserable because our choices are no longer sufficiently limited that we feel we can accomplish everything we want"

— 18:15

An explosion of choice removes the sense that anything can be completed, and change imposed without consultation removes the sense of having been asked. The resulting dissatisfaction is permanent rather than transitional, which is read here as the reason the slogans that land are the ones pointing backwards.

20:30 - The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea

The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea.

"the point about time which fascinates me is I often say that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea"

— 20:30

Meaning rather than magnitude carries the value, and a mathematical model can hold only one direction at a time. Fast speech and slow speech are both forms of politeness; an unattended check-in and an escorted one are both excellent. Context settles which reading lands, and no single modelled number holds both.

22:44 - Efficiency should be offered and never enforced, because some value exists only in time spent

Efficiency should be offered and never enforced, because some value exists only in the time spent.

"sometimes as an option self-checkouts are great okay as an obligation they're they're bad because sometimes the time spent in in the process is where the value comes"

— 22:44

Where the journey is what was bought, compressing it does not deliver the same good sooner — it removes the good. The same mechanism as an option and as an obligation produces opposite results, which is why the offer has to stay an offer.

23:06 - Customers deliberately choose inefficiency when the occasion calls for it

Customers deliberately choose inefficiency when the occasion calls for it.

"people on a Saturday love nothing better than to shop in the most inefficient way possible"

— 23:06

The inefficiency is legible as care rather than as waste, and people pay for it deliberately when the occasion calls for it. The same pace on a different occasion is simply a queue, which is the boundary rather than an objection.

23:26 - Craft reads as craft only while it stays visibly slow, so batching destroys it

Craft reads as craft only while it stays visibly slow, so batching can destroy the thing being sold.

"said stop making two drinks at once you're in fact sorry you're only allowed to make two drinks at once they actually deliberately slowed down the process"

— 23:42

Part of the purchase is watching the thing made, so parallel processing signals a production line instead. Capping staff at two drinks at once slowed the process on purpose: the drink was unchanged and the signal was not. Visible slowness is ground the speed-optimisers have left vacant.

24:36 - Whatever cannot be made faster gets dearer, which inverts the price of services against goods

Whatever cannot be made faster gets dearer, which is why time-dependent services have inverted in price against goods.

"manufactured goods where you can enjoy extraordinary efficiencies of production you can compress the time and effort required to make something have massively reduced in cost"

— 24:36

Goods absorbed a century of compression in the time required to make them and time-dependent services did not, so their relative prices have inverted. A television is close to an impulse purchase while childcare is agonised over, and a century ago the ratio ran the other way round.

25:28 - Some things have to be sold slowly, because that is how long persuasion takes

Some things have to be sold slowly, because that is how long the persuasion takes.

"some things you've got to sell slow"

— 25:34

The cost of the channel is itself the evidence of commitment, so a cheap channel cannot carry an expensive claim. A half-hour live demonstration to one family is expensive next to automated media, and that is the point rather than the objection.

26:00 - Defining the audience as whoever engages cheaply and quickly is self-defeating

Defining the audience as whoever will engage cheaply and quickly is self-defeating.

"that's how long it takes to sell that product what I think we're doing in advertising is we're starting to Define our Target audiences not as the people who could potentially buy our product"

— 26:00

The target quietly becomes the people the medium can reach rather than the people who might actually buy. Selecting for cheap, fast engagement optimises the media plan and deoptimises the business it was bought for.

26:22 - Effort makes a message persuasive, because anything cheap to produce proves nothing

Effort makes a message persuasive, because anything cheap to produce proves nothing.

"there's a fundamental correlation between in some ways the expense of a medium okay the amount time and effort that gets invested into an act of persuasion and how persuasive it is"

— 26:22

Anything cheap to produce proves nothing, because anyone could have sent it. What visibly cost time and money carries its own evidence of commitment, and the receiver reads the expense as a statement about how much they matter — a correlation rather than a rate card, and one that only bites where persuasion is the job.

27:40 - The deliverable is a by-product and the work of making it is the actual value

The deliverable is a by-product; the work of making it is the actual value.

"most of you if you were students wrote essays or something like that as undergraduates as students right fairly confident to say that nobody's actually kept them"

— 27:40

Producing something forces answers to questions the maker would otherwise never get round to asking: what the business stands for, who it appeals to, how it differs. The artefact can be handed over and the thinking cannot, which is why a campaign is worth making even where it will never run.

29:30 - Some things are improved by compression and others are destroyed by it

Some things are improved by compression and others are destroyed by it, and nothing distinguishes them by default.

"there are things in life which you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient and there are things where the value is precisely in the"

— 29:30

The two categories are set side by side with no test offered for telling them apart, and the absence of a test is stated as the difficulty rather than glossed over. The default assumption — that faster is better — contains nothing that would distinguish them.

Personal Branding Lessons

Most of this hour is aimed at organisations big enough to have a modelling team, a transport budget and someone whose job is to say no. Working alone strips that padding out: the veto and the demand for proof both come out of your own head, usually within a minute of each other, and the judgement they are arguing about is the one thing on the table nobody can buy, copy or hire away from you. What follows is that hour converted into moves you can make this week.

Put the long-horizon work in the diary before the deadline work goes in. The account man spends the last wish on a meeting two and a half hours away, and two other people's lifetimes go with it. Alone, you are both parties: the deadline work is the client email, the brand work is the thing that gets postponed for it, and the postponement never feels like a decision because the urgent item is the one with a name and a date on it. Block the slot first, and note what happens when you don't — twelve months of paid invoices and nothing anyone could find you by. 01:18

Stop raising your posting rate once the rate is comfortable. The inner ring of the speedometer is the lesson: equal steps up the outer scale buy wildly unequal amounts of time, and past a certain point you are taking on all of the risk for a minute of gain. Going from three posts a week to seven works the same way — each new increment buys less than the one before while the cost of producing it climbs. The consequence of ignoring that is visible in the work: posts that read like they were typed on the way to something else, by someone who has stopped noticing things. 02:29

Change what your own scoreboard sorts by. The ticketing app ranks routes by speed, so the cheaper and more scenic option does not lose the comparison — it never enters it. Your analytics screen does the same thing with views, and the sort order quietly decides what you make next. Add a second column you fill in by hand — who replied, who booked, who forwarded it — or the essay that brought your two best clients stays parked below a clip about nothing, because only one of them returns something you can count. 04:53

Refuse to convert an open question into a maths problem you can win. Closing down the solution space produces an answer nobody can argue with, and the answers that lose are the ones with a picture in them: free drinks on the train, a ball pit for the kids. "Which platform has the best return" is that move performed on yourself, and it is winnable, which is exactly what is wrong with it. Ask the version with no single answer — what would make this worth someone's Sunday morning — and you will stop producing a feed that is interchangeable with the four others in your niche. 07:12

Publish the wait rather than trying to shorten it. The map showing the car approaching does not bring the car any sooner; it removes the not-knowing, and what people call a complaint about length is usually a complaint about uncertainty. So state your reply window on the contact page, give the newsletter a fixed day, and tell a buyer what happens next and roughly when. That ends the email at day four asking whether you got the first one — the one that arrives with an apology attached and a standard you never actually set. 08:17

Set your mail to collect twice a day and leave one flagged exception. Instantaneous email moved the sifting from the one person who knows whether something is urgent onto every recipient, and a day chopped into ten-minute pieces is not the same day as one hundred-minute block, however the diary adds it up. You cannot fix the convention, but you can unilaterally stop checking, which is the whole of the fix available to one person. The result is a morning where the draft you opened at nine is still the thing in front of you at eleven. 10:05

Spend disproportionately on the channel that cannot be scaled. Where human time is irreducible the cost keeps climbing, and that same irreducibility is what makes the message land: a handwritten letter changes a decision as large as whether to sell a house, and it does so because of the effort visible in it. Write twelve real letters or twelve genuinely specific emails instead of a hundred templated ones, and the same logic runs through anything where the length itself is doing the arguing. Three will reply, and one of them was never going to find you through a feed. 26:22

Make the campaign you have no intention of running. The undergraduate essay is worthless as an object and valuable as a process, and by the same reading the work of producing advertising forces a business to answer what it stands for, who it is for and how it differs — questions it otherwise never gets around to. Draft the launch page, the tagline and the thirty-second pitch for an offer you have not built. You will catch yourself deleting the third sentence because you cannot yet say who it is for and what it stands against, which is the finding, not the failure. 27:40

Sort your recurring work into what to compress and what to leave slow, in writing. The distinction does not get drawn by default, because the automatic assumption is that faster is better and the automation gets applied indiscriminately; the skill named at the end of the talk is knowing which pile a thing belongs in. Put invoicing, scheduling and file admin in one column and the reading you do before you write, the conversations, the second draft in the other. Then defend the second column the way you would a client meeting, or it goes on losing the afternoons it has been losing quietly for months. 29:30

Questions

Each answer ends at the moment in the recording where it is given.

Each answer ends at the moment in the recording where it is given.

Why does effort make a message more persuasive?

Anything cheap to produce proves little, since anyone could have sent it; what visibly cost time and money carries its own evidence of commitment. The receiver reads the expense as a statement about how much they matter, much as long copy reads as a position someone is prepared to defend. It is put as a correlation rather than a rate card, and it only bites where persuasion is the job: a dear channel that reaches nobody persuades nobody. 26:22

What does the process give you that the finished thing cannot?

Producing something forces answers to questions a business otherwise never gets round to asking: what it stands for, who it appeals to, how it differs. Those answers stay with whoever did the work — the artefact can be handed over, the thinking cannot, which is why a positioning decision outlasts the campaign that produced it. It is hedged, the value holding to some extent, and the argument only works where the making genuinely demanded decisions rather than filling in a template. 28:21

Why did making messages instant make everyone less productive?

Removing the delay shifted a sorting job from the one person who knew the urgency to everyone who might receive it. With nothing declaring itself time-sensitive, each recipient checks every few minutes in case something is, and a day cut into fragments loses more than the minutes involved. The cure described is a default rather than discipline — slow delivery, urgency declared by the sender — so anyone acting alone can do little beyond fetching mail at long intervals and defending whole blocks with a schedule set in advance. 10:14

When does efficiency start costing you?

It turns against you at the point where each further increment buys less than the one before while the exposure it creates keeps rising. Time per fixed distance is the reciprocal of speed, so the same ten on the dial that bought ten minutes low down buys about a minute higher up — figures given as an order of magnitude, not measurements. The threshold named is a comfort judgement rather than a derived optimum, which is why polishing where you already stand runs out. 04:02

Why does slowing something down sometimes make it better?

Because part of what someone is buying can be visible in the making, and compressing it removes the thing they were reading. A large coffee chain capped its staff at two drinks at once: the drink was unchanged, but batching had been telling customers they were watching a production line rather than something handmade. It holds only where the process is the purchase; for the customer with a train to catch the same pace is just a queue. Visible slowness is nonetheless ground the speed-optimisers have left vacant. 23:44

Can the opposite of a good idea also be a good idea?

Yes — worth is carried by what a treatment means, not by how much of it there is. Fast speech in one region and slow speech in another are both forms of politeness, one respecting the listener's time, the other spending the speaker's own; an unattended check-in and an escorted one are both called great. What decides between them is context rather than merit, so the person on the receiving end settles which reading lands — and no single modelled number holds both at once. 21:28

Why does a new tool stop being optional?

Because adoption moves the default for everyone, including people who never chose it. An advantage lasts only while others are unaware of it: once a faster route was widely known, arriving quickly stopped being a courtesy and became the expectation. The claim is not that such tools are bad — four in five motorists want parking apps gone, not because the apps were poor necessarily, but because compulsion took them where no signal reaches. The tipping point is when the holdout becomes the odd one out. 16:24

What should you deliberately keep slow?

Anything whose worth comes from the time, effort or discomfort it takes to get through — the cases where the journey, not necessarily the destination, is what was bought. Compressing those does not deliver the same good sooner; it deletes it. No test is supplied for telling them apart, which is the whole of the difficulty: the automatic assumption that faster is better will sort them by default unless something stops it, as with ideas left to accumulate over months rather than answered at once. 30:54

Sources

Rory Sutherland – Are We Now Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? | Nudgestock 2024

The sections above follow the episode's own order. Each timestamp is the point in the recording where the idea is discussed, so the post reads as a map of the conversation rather than a rearrangement of it.

Quotations come from the episode transcript with spoken filler ("okay", "right", "you know", "um", "actually", "kind of", "sort of") and false starts removed. No words are added: square brackets mark anything inserted for sense, and an ellipsis marks any cut. British spellings are restored, and speech-to-text errors were repaired against context only where the intended word is unambiguous. Where a line appears both in a cold-open teaser and in its place in the conversation, the timestamp cites the second — the point at which it is actually said.

Quotes are stamped with the moment they are said rather than with a speaker's name.