on purpose but which end with unintended consequences. Your mental model of the world was wrong. The problem is, we often don’t know we’ve made them. So we don’t improve next time.
That is what happened to me: my mental model was wrong. Several years earlier, I launched a campaign that was very successful. Don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it. This success partly shaped my views about advertising. Because the results were so good, I assumed that the decisions I made were good ones. Some were. But others were not. I had missed the other possible reasons that might have contributed to this success. I was guilty of what is known as a narrative fallacy.2 This is where we use flawed stories of the past to shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future.
My success led to a later failure. I didn’t wear a seat belt all those years ago. And because I didn’t crash, I stopped wearing one.
Then I crashed.
2
We are hedgehogs
This is a book about decision-making. Specifically marketing decisions. I’ve spent 20 years in marketing. Every year I discover new things that make me seriously question the beliefs I’ve held and the decisions I’ve made along the way. It’s pretty humbling.
I’ve been lucky, though. I’ve been tasked to manage some truly wonderful brands. To create new ones. To take a stab at troubled ones. I was even given the opportunity to build a marketing lab – to create hundreds of experiments. To test theories. And I got up-and-close with some of the world’s finest marketers, incredible people who challenged and changed how I think.
I’ve had some successes and failures. While I’ve enjoyed the pleasure the successes brought, the failures are more interesting. To be absolutely clear on this – I’d rather not fail. Nobody wants to. I don’t care what they say. But we do fail. More than we admit. Often more than we even know.
I’m convinced that our failures teach us more about our own decision-making than our successes do… if we let them.
If I were pushed to offer just one way to improve decision-making, it would be this: focus on how you react to discovering you are wrong. I believe this is the critical distinction between what I call ‘fox marketers’ and the rest of us.
If you genuinely enjoy understanding why something didn’t work and why your mental model was wrong, you will improve your decision-making. If you find it threatening, I’m betting you won’t.
Here’s the rub. Knowing why we make mistakes doesn’t always stop us from making them. As you’ll see. But I believe you’ll improve your odds. Improving our odds is what decision-making is about.
In 1951, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote The Hedgehog and the Fox. The book divided the great thinkers of the world into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs believed in having a big unifying idea that explained everything. They have a single lens through which they see the world. They can explain everything through their ideology. Foxes, on the other hand, pursue many different ideas. Scattered. Often unrelated. Even contradictory. They have no single ideology or theory on how things work. Berlin told us that, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”.
Dante was a hedgehog. Plato, Pascal, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Proust – all hedgehogs. Foxes include Shakespeare, Aristotle, Montaigne and Joyce. Tolstoy was, according to Berlin, a fox by nature, but believed in being a hedgehog.
I’ll pause here to clarify that I can add absolutely nothing to Berlin’s categorisation of the world’s big thinkers. I’d struggle to even pronounce half of these names. My interest in Berlin’s categorisation is due to a man called Philip Tetlock, a political forecaster and author. When it comes to understanding prediction and better decision-making, all roads lead to Professor Tetlock.
Tetlock analysed the characteristics of political forecaster experts. He found that they fall into two groups. One group of experts tended to organise their thinking around big ideas or ideologies. Some were socialists. Others in favour of a free market. Others still favoured state control. But the common thread was that their thinking was ideological. They would always find a way to explain what happened or what would happen through their ideology. Things that their theory couldn’t explain, they discarded as irrelevant distractions. Tetlock dubbed this group the ‘hedgehogs’ (of course).
The other group were more pragmatic experts. The ‘foxes’. These experts relied more on observation than theory. They had multiple unrelated ideas and approaches, used many different analytical tools. They chose the appropriate tool depending on the specific challenge, and gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. They talked in possibilities and probabilities. Not certainties. And – hugely important – they changed their minds when the data conflicted with their initial view.
What Tetlock found was that foxes were better forecasters.3
Predicting how people will respond to our marketing initiatives is difficult. Ideally, we are trying to accurately predict what will happen. I’d wager a bet that much of the time we don’t even know afterwards. Isolating and measuring the full effect of our activity is not easy. We often move on without truly knowing. Or worse – we move on, thinking that the decisions we made were effective, when they were not. And when we’re making the decision – the right answer isn’t always intuitive. Not to ourselves and especially not to our non-marketing colleagues. This marketing stuff is messy.
It is easy enough to measure how people respond to our marketing in the short term. It is far more difficult to measure how our marketing is influencing people’s behaviour over the long term. Because every situation is different in some way, we don’t have many hard and fast rules. So we base our decisions on theories. We hypothesise what we think will happen.
There’s nothing wrong with having marketing theories. We need them. The problem is that we fall in love with unsubstantiated theories. We see all results through our preferred theory of choice. And we are not good at changing our minds, even when the evidence starts to stack up.
What I’m getting to is – we are hedgehogs.
3
A hedgehog that believes in being a fox
My dad was a doctor. A professor of pathology, a man of science and a teacher. He was a humble, quiet-spoken man, despite his reputation as one of the world’s most respected pathologists. Whenever I met his students, they would corner me for hours telling me how much they adored him. A year after he died, University College Dublin created a student award: the Peter Dervan Memorial Medal for Excellence in Cancer Pathology.
He was my hero.
If there is a polar opposite profession to my dad’s, it is advertising. He told me I used to quiz him about the press ads in his Sunday newspapers when I was as young as ten or 11. Some years later, he bought me my first advertising book, Ogilvy On Advertising. Not a bad choice for a man with no marketing experience or knowledge himself.
Medicine and marketing are miles away from each other, but both rely on decision-making. As a pathologist, my dad had to make high-stress decisions on a regular basis. I remember one story where he had to recommend treatment for a young boy who had discovered a tumour in his arm. It was growing rapidly. Do you amputate to stop it spreading, but lose the arm? Or do you treat it and wait, but risk that the cancer spreads? Two of the world’s most famous pathologists advised the parents that they should amputate. My dad disagreed. He recommended they wait. He believed that the cancer was benign and would stop growing. The boy’s father bet on my dad and didn’t amputate. The tumour continued to grow. But then it stopped, and started to shrink.
