Tech-Driven Compliance and Consistency

The ad industry discovered something important long ago:

We like to think we’re a rational, logical species. But we’re not.

This is why most ads don’t list features. They don’t tell us about battery life or store opening hours. They tell us about how this thing will change our lives for the better.

There’s a harsh reality to this.

The ad industry can’t survive on how it would like us humans to behave. Ad agencies don’t get paid based on how we should operate. They run based on how we actually behave, as imperfect beings, built for a world that no longer exists.

And so, while many of my self-selected mentors come from within the world of psychology and child development, one of them is an ad executive.

Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, and the co-founder of a behavioural science practice within the agency. This interdisciplinary field of behavioural science studies human behaviour and decision-making in a systematic way, helping us understand seemingly irrational choices and finding solutions to real-world problems.

Many of these solutions seem illogical at first. For example, achieving a 24% redudction in antisocial behaviour by painting the faces of babies on shop shutters.

When Rory talks, I listen. Here he is, in his most recent column in The Spectator, building on my previous post’s argument that a technologically-attuned world doesn’t work for us.

The cost-cutting promise of technology can only be delivered if decision–making is codified and made formulaic. A bureaucracy establishes power and defends its legitimacy by pretending that all decisions can be made through adherence to context-blind, formal procedures of its own devising. Tech and bureaucracy therefore feed each other. This results in a world where compliance and consistency are prioritised over quality of outcome.

— The speed-camera approach to government, Rory Sutherland

I’m guessing Rory wasn’t thinking about schools or children’s social care when he wrote this, but “compliance and consistency … prioritised over quality of outcome” would often work well as an overarching motto.

School behaviour apps promised us a world where a child’s behaviour could be codified and where our response could be systematised. AI will promise us more.

If we want to live in a world where the priority is quality of outcome, we must return to understanding how humans really behave. We must put technology in its place.

I’d love to hear from you: Does what I’ve written resonate with you? I’m a big fan of tech (I ran a travel tech company for a decade, amongst other things). But I’m a bigger fan of humans, and I believe tech should help us do what only we can do.

If this resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a colleague or a parent who is finding the technologically-attuned childhood tough.