OPTICS, MATHS AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Sir Isaac Newton was undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of mankind. Without Newton, the modern world would be very different. Without Newton, there would be no Einstein, no Microsoft, no iPhone, no internet, no moonshot, no Facebook.

Newton invented the calculus that underpins modern mathematics and all that we do with it (as it turns out simultaneously with Gottfried Leibniz, even though Newton could never bring himself to concede the fact). His theory of light and optics transformed that field, too. His extraordinary synthesis of the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo transformed the physical sciences fundamentally. So, for example, his laws of motion and gravity are still part and parcel of how we think about the physical world (Einstein and Heisenberg notwithstanding). Newton was without doubt the preeminent scientific mind of his day and was voted largely unopposed to the post of President of the Royal Society (the leading scientific community of his day).

For all his talents and achievements he was not a nice man; not an easy person to love; not even very pleasant company. He was widely reported¹:

‘to have been an unsmiling and humorless, puritanical man with a countenance that was ordinarily melancholy and thoughtfull'.

Thomas Hearne, a precise contemporary, put it this way:

‘Sir Isaac was a man of no very promising aspect. He was a short, well-set man. He was full of thought, and spoke very little in company so that his conversation was not agreeable.'

A grumpy little fellow, then.

For all his extraordinary gifts, it's hard to deny that Newton was a truly (brilliant?) terrible feuder, especially when it came to allocating ownership of ideas: for example, after the publication of the Principia, he had a series of bitter quarrels with his contemporary and sometime friend, Robert Hooke (the leading experimental scientist of the day and another irascible and difficult individual) over the latter's alleged contribution to Newton's work on gravity, motion and optics. Newton seems to have found it hard to give credit where it was due: the glory, in his mind, at least, was largely his.

This makes the letter to Hooke quoted at the start of the chapter all the more significant because it reveals how even Sir Isaac Newton was forced to acknowledge (even if only this once and in private correspondence) the role of others' work in his success. The full text runs thus:

‘What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.'

On the shoulders of giants, indeed.

“ Newton's work was built on the work of others. ”

So even the greatest of physicists is compelled to admit that – far from being original and unique – his work was built on the work of others. He copied.

To be fair, this is the working method we know as the ‘Scientific Method', used by Newton and his contemporaries in the 18^th-Century Royal Society. This way of working creates a context in which scientists can stand on each other's shoulders – to use the work of others confidently.

However, it is not a case of merely assuming the truth of a fellow scientist's work based on status and reputation (which was how the ‘natural philosophers' of the Middle Ages were forced to work). It is significant to note that the Latin motto of the Royal Society, Nullius verba, roughly translates as ‘don't believe what they tell you just because they're important'.

The Method also discourages scientists adopting a view based on its plausibility (this is what should be or what we'd like to be the case). Instead, it insists on observable and verifiable fact: empirical evidence collected in a robust, transparent and reliable manner.

The method is not infallible by any means – even the practice of peer review can allow fashions and trends in ideas to spread, especially in the Social Sciences.² The method can also be quite conservative in suppressing certain views that subsequently get accepted. Equally, new work can overthrow previously apparently well-grounded and long-held assumptions – for example Einstein's General Relativity exploits the fact that Newton failed to ‘characterize' (describe in detail) what he means by Time and Space, ‘these being commonly known', as the old man put it. Einstein merely took this lack of empirical foundation as a starting point for the work that was to challenge Newton's picture of the universe.

Newton, Einstein and all those scientists who have followed them; you, me and everyone who has ever lived: we build our kingdoms on the work of others, some we've met, some we'll never meet, some alive and some long dead.

“ We all build our kingdoms on the work of others, often those we'll never meet. ”

MARGINAL GAINS

Five years ago, few would have imagined that Britain would ever become the dominant force in competitive cycling – not France, not Italy, not Spain, not Germany, not the USA but Team GB – and do so both on the road and on the track.

In the first 98 years of the most famous road cycling event (the Tour de France), not one Britain appeared in the top three riders. Yet less than three years later, a British rider became overall champion and the British cycling team had managed to sweep seven out of ten gold medals at the Olympics. Cycling has now become a mainstream sport in this country – both on the road and on the track; for spectators and for athletes.

The story of how they did it starts and ends with one man and his determination to learn from elsewhere.

When Dave Brailsford took over as Team Sky performance coach, he and the team leadership set very clear goals for themselves and developed a very simple strategy (which Brailsford himself has credited to his MBA studies at Sheffield Hallam University): ‘the aggregation of marginal gains'. Put simply, this is a version of ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' – focus on creating a host of very small advantages which together add up to a big one. First at Team Sky and then at the British Olympic cycling team.

Brailsford has often revealed his debt to Billy Beane (the legendary Oakland A's baseball coach, immortalized in Moneyball by Michael Lewis):

‘to have someone come in and say: “Are we measuring the right things?” was refreshing … Beane stood back and said he wasn't going to go with conventional wisdom … it's refreshing that there was an industry where everyone thought in one way until a guy came along and said “hang on a minute”.'³

Brailsford's use of statistics has helped him make better decisions about team selections and when to invest in particular players, as well as when to axe them. He is part of a group of elite performance ‘statties' working in UK elite sport (like Mike Forde at Chelsea FC and Damien Comolli of Liverpool FC) who learn from each other and across sporting boundaries.

In cycling, this kind of numerate mind-set allowed the Olympic team to calculate exactly how much further they would need to travel how many more turns of the wheel – and how much time they would lose, if the riders strayed more than 4 cm from the black race line: in these small margins victories and defeats are built. As Al Pacino says in Any Given Sunday:

‘You find out life's this game of inches. And so is football … The inches we need are everywhere around us.'

Brailsford brought in expertise and techniques from a host of distant disciplines (rather than from other cycling coaches): from epidemiology, from sleep science, from nutrition, from any other field that seemed capable of giving his athletes a marginal advantage. He has talked at length about team building with the manager of the most successful soccer club in the world, Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson, while also fretting about how to use medically approved hand-washing techniques to reduce the incidence and spread of viruses and bugs, which can impact the riders' ability to perform.

‘Do you really know how to clean your hands? Without leaving the bits between your fingers?⁴

“ Copying wins cycle races. ”

Brailsford's ‘aggregation of marginal gains' is an incredibly powerful overall strategy but it depends on learning from – copying – the specialist expertise that studies those margins. Copying wins cycle races.

HIS DARK MATERIALS

Phillip Pulman is one of the most successful novelists of the modern era: his Dark Materials trilogy has sold more than 20 million copies, won prize after prize from the critics and stolen the hearts and minds of readers around the world with its complex and subtle fantasies of parallel worlds, science, faith, impending disaster and make-or-break moral choices facing the young and the powerless. As the late Christopher Hitchens puts it, Pullman has performed the apparently impossible feat of ‘dissolve[ing] the frontier between adult and juvenile fiction' – remarkable for any author, for this or any other era, but honed, we suspect by 20 years of sharing his enthusiasm for the great Greek myths with high school students.

Perhaps Pullman's most memorable invention is the narrative device of the ‘daemon' – a visible and tangible animal-shaped soul that his Dark Materials characters can't help but display to each other. As a story-telling device, the ‘daemon' allows Pullman all kinds of interesting narrative opportunities – subtly suggesting elements of an individual character's personality that they'd rather keep hidden or dramatizing the psychological impact on an individual's psyche of interacting with other, more forceful characters.

So when an interviewer asked recently⁵ about Pullman's own ‘daemon', he revealed that:

‘she's a bird of the crow family … scruffy old thing! She steals things – anything bright and shiny.'

Which explains the source of his own literary invention:

‘I steal story ideas. I'm quite happy to steal them from Shakespeare or from soaps on TV (funnily I steal a lot from Neighbours) … or from the top of the bus.'

“ Copying lies at the heart of creativity. ”

Copying – for Pullman at least – lies at the heart of creativity.

As it turns out, he's not alone in thinking this.

TALENT COPIES

Picasso had a very similar perspective about the central role of copying in art and artists' attempts to make art: ‘talent copies, genius steals' he famously observed (as my old chum, Faris Yakob, reminds us all.

TS Eliot went further, suggesting that while all poets copy by necessity, bad ones merely ‘deface what they copy; great ones make something better or at least different'.

Famously William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language filched his plot lines from the manuscripts he found on the bookstalls of the City of London (only three of his plots are original in the sense that he created them without a primary external source). However, he used that copying to create new and different versions of the storylines he'd filched.

“ Only 3 of Shakespeare's plots are original. ”

George RR Martin, author of the books which have become the smash hit TV series Game of Thrones, recently confessed to the same approach:

‘In A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own.'⁶

Finally Voltaire – the great French intellectual action hero of the Enlightenment and champion of independent rational thought (as opposed to received wisdom) – described creativity in a somewhat downbeat way, as nothing more than ‘judicious imitation'.

So let's consider the case of one Elvis Aaron Presley, 17-year-old truck driver, only son of a white trash couple in Memphis, Tennessee. How do you think he managed to get to climb to the top of the cultural tree – to become, as the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein put it, ‘the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution—the 60s comes from it'?

Did he achieve this through pure originality – by working things out all on his own? By squeezing the music until something original and world-shaking emerged? Or, by taking the music and the style and the dance of those he saw around him on Beale Street and creating his own version.

Elvis was the King of Rock ‘n' Roll but he was – as we shall see – also a big fat copycat.

WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER?

All of us are struggling to innovate – to find new solutions to old problems, to find new ways of working, new ways of thinking that might just – please, Lord, this time – work better than the old ways; that work faster, more sustainably or just more efficiently. We strive to find new products and new strategies to keep up with the rapidly changing outside world (and the demands of our competition and our financial overlords).

Of course, some of this is driven by a neophilia – an insatiable desire for the new, whatever the cost and whatever the value, one of the hallmarks of our contemporary culture – but much of it is better-intentioned than that.

“ We all want new answers and new solutions for the very real and very pressing challenges that our organizations face. ”

We all want new answers and new solutions for the very real and very pressing challenges that our organizations face. We want new things to point to and talk about: new ideas and new policies.

Now we've learned an awful lot in recent years, specifically from the software and service industries about how we organize our work – about being more ‘agile' and prototyping rapidly. All of which helps the speed we get to market and our ability to learn from customers (even if it ignores the absolutely central role of copying in the day-to-day business of writing software) – without cut-and-paste, each and every line of code has to be written afresh. Far better and easier to reuse other coders' work e.g. via code directories and similar.

IF IT WASN'T FOR YOU PESKY KIDS

All kinds of organizations struggle with challenges that involve humans, such as in the domains of marketing, behaviour change and change management. Doing anything with this human element is naturally messy, confusing and in many ways unpredictable. Human behaviour is a complex phenomenon and genuinely hard to change (think of how hard it is to change the behaviour of those closest to you and then think again about people you haven't met and scale this up by hundreds, thousands and then tens of thousands).

“ Human behaviour is a complex phenomenon and genuinely hard to change. ”

Whatever the folks that run behaviour change programmes tell you, these are always much less successful than you'd imagine – most such programmes inside organizations go the way of all the rest, leaving some odd marks on the company organogram and a few quirky t-shirts and coffee mugs. This is part of the reason why resorting to M&A to drive growth is almost always a bad bet – getting two groups of people feeling anxious for their jobs to do the one thing is more than twice as hard as getting one group to do so.

Equivalent programmes outside the organization generally fare no better – even at its best, marketing is a weak rather than a strong force in business (which is why we celebrate successes when we see them) and most governments' attempts to change the behaviour of their citizens are far less successful than anyone would like to imagine, certainly not as effective as the minister announcing the programmes seems to believe (which is why the appropriately named Behavioural Insights Team at the UK Cabinet Office represents such a step forward in policy design).

So it's worth asking yourself: why do you persist in the search for your salvation in the new – the brilliant and novel solution that you haven't yet found – when you can more easily copy something that's worked before?

THE TYRANNY OF THE SINGULAR

Part of the reason why we do is that we like to treat each such problem or challenge as unique – as unlike anything that we have faced before – one which demands a unique and singular solution. This is what I call the tyranny of the singular.

“ Part of the reason why we do is that we like to treat each such problem or challenge as unique. ”

A unique problem is flattering to both problem owner and would-be solver (one is elevated in status by the unique nature of the challenge in front of them – yes, it is genuinely tricky to sort out and only the best is up to this kind of thing – and the other by the unique skills and strategic genius/magic it must take to solve it).

But this attitude is genuinely unhelpful to both parties: it can make it seem nigh on impossible to solve any one given problem, except through superpowers, derring-do and so on. We recently worked with a client who unintentionally hindered their people from solving the central strategic challenge facing the organization by describing it as being ‘like changing the tyres on an F1 race-car, doing 250 mph BUT without slowing down or entering the pit lane'. That is, impossible without a magic wand or TARDIS, or both.

Seeing things as singular is genuinely flattering to both problem owner and would-be solver. But equally unhelpful.

Equally our expectations of the unique and special nature of the appropriate solution – the prince come to rescue us from the tower – often leads us to dismiss perfectly acceptable and workable solutions on the basis of their familiarity and effectiveness elsewhere (the very basis on which we should be considering them). In other words, the tyranny of the singular makes it harder to select or buy good solutions, too.

Why not copy something that has worked elsewhere?

NOT ALL COPYING IS GOOD

Before we go any further it is worth acknowledging that this kind of talk makes many people feel uncomfortable. And not just because of assumptions about the singularity of each problem and the requisite heroic qualities of those who can tackle these singular challenges.

No, many of us also feel uncomfortable because our individualist culture which so values originality, disdains and stigmatizes copying.

“ Our individualist culture values originality and disdains and stigmatizes copying. ”

Consider how hard our culture works for this individualism: we are encouraged to ‘self-actualize' (literally the ultimate need-state according Maslow and co.), to find our own song, our own lifestyle and our own selves, either on the therapist's couch, in the dark self-help aisle of the bookstore or on some long, dark night of the soul.

This, we are taught, is where original ideas and things come from – the lone (sometimes tortured) genius working their magic in splendid isolation. We look to our individualist innovative heroes – Picasso, Shakespeare, Newton, Jobs, Freud, and (and their heroic journeys to create their work and earn the public's appreciation – even if the latter only comes posthumously after a life of struggling poverty, general rejection and single-minded isolated creativity). By contrast, it is copying that we hold responsible for all that is mediocre and worthless, in art as in commerce. As Oscar Wilde puts it, ‘most people are other people: their thoughts someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation'.

By contrast, we imagine that the crowd – The HERD – could not possibly create anything. Hence the long standing use of the black sheep motif by the great creative agency, BBH to highlight the renegade and anti-ovine nature of their creativity. And equally, by way of counterblast, my use of the Warhol-ish sheep in the design of this book.

My point is here is simple: original ideas, things and strategies are the product of many hands (and brains) and not of the one-man band. It's what we learn from each other – what we copy – that allows us to create new things. Copying can – in the right circumstances – and does create novel and effective solutions to problems. Copiers can and do produce novelty and value far more than the solo act (in fact, as we've seen, the greats have always – well nearly always – seen copying as a central drive of their working practice). As the political journalist Owen Jones puts it:

We are socially constructed beings, forming an immense dynamic system that cannot be understood by reducing it to its individual parts…The good or bad that we do has the fingerprints of others all over it.”⁷

But that's not how it feels, right? When you realise that George Harrison's My Sweet Lord is effectively (albeit unconsciously, according to the NYC circuit judge's ruling) the same song as Jimmy Mack's He's so Fine (a hit for the Chiffons, back in the day), it's hard not to feel worse about the ex-Beatle's tune. Copies are never as good as originals, right?

Let's be clear: not all copying is good; indeed, copying that aims for replication, mimicry or the practice that business calls ‘benchmarking' – all styles of ‘tight' copying AKA ‘single white female' copying (after the movie of the same name - see Chapter 2) often reduce value rather than increase it.

‘Tight' or SWF copying can often be as bad a strategy than not copying.

“ Copying with a twist or copying from further away – is what the world needs more of. ”

By contrast, ‘looser copying' – copying with a twist or copying from further away – is what we think the world needs more of. We'll explore lots of different ways to do this, later in the book.

So in order to really embrace copying, you're going to have to do more than learn how to do it well (or badly); first, you're also going to need to overcome the cultural stigma around copying and copiers.

AFTER THE HERD

My previous two books, HERD and I'll Have What She's Having (the latter with Professors Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien), both stopped short of providing specific recommendations about what to do with the map of how people do what they do that I was trying to describe.

I was happy describing a better map to help readers better navigate the kinds of human-based challenges discussed already. I felt it was enough merely to stimulate our peers and contemporaries to work out new answers to the question of how to change behaviour for themselves.

Since then, I've had many interesting conversations with readers of all sorts, in marketing and the military, in politics and the c-suite, many of which have opened my eyes to new applications of the map but all of which have made it clear that we need to go further, to provide more practical guidance. As Marx observed: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.'⁸

So this book is – to use the jargon – as much about praxis as it is about theory, about doing rather than describing. About how and what you should copy as much as about why you should copy and copying's interesting history.

About how to use your ‘sheep-inside'.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF QUESTIONS

At the heart of the new approach I describe in the following pages are some very different kinds of questions to the ones most strategists ask:

These ‘kinda' questions break open the singularity trap and help you access the appropriate examples to try out in the real world.

But you also need to know what to copy – what kind of thing works to solve similar kinds of problem. You could just go for some of what you fancy – the strategies your favourite brands adopt or your favourite marketer or business guru recommends. Much of the time this will be better than sweating the singularity.

But even better would be to use our archive of 52 different kinds of successful strategy, sorted by ‘kinda' thing – by behaviour type – so that you can very quickly go from ‘kinda' thing to ‘kinda' strategy, to example and then on to prototype. And then start to learn what seems to work and what doesn't for the challenge you are faced with.

COPIED FROM PEOPLE WHO'VE COPIED

A lot of this work arises from the collaboration that I've been fortunate enough to develop over the last seven or so years with Professor Alex Bentley of Bristol University. Specifically his extraordinary knowledge of the behavioural science literature, his intellectual generosity and his incredible practical expertise have helped to create, for example, the ‘kinda' sorting box and to develop this way of solving problems together.

At the same time, I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of work with John V. Willshire of Smithery (the inventor of the Artefact Cards and the illustrative style, which you will see popping up throughout the book). His contribution to the thinking and the practice here is immeasurable (literally so) – not least in his detailed reading of the text.

But that's not a full and complete list of collaborators – some of the people I respect most have added – whether knowingly or not – to this thinking (see Acknowledgements).

I've tried to capture the flavour of our work in the way I've put this book together – informed but useful, serious but playful at the same time. For example, at the beginning of each chapter I summarize what the chapter contains: I've also included suggestions of games you might play and things to do – puzzles to solve and ways of thinking through issues, as well as some texts you might want to consult for further exploration of the ideas we borrow here.

LEARN TO CODE OR LEARN TO COPY?

There's a lot of noise in business today about the importance of learning to code (to write software code) and there's a lot to be said for doing so (I enjoyed greatly my day with Richard and Kathryn from Decoded and would recommend this kind of thing wholeheartedly).

However, in my view, learning to copy well (or, as it turns out, copy badly) really should be one of the central parts of any business education. Whether you work inside or outside organizations or in the space between them and their customers or other stakeholders, whether you work in marketing, in policy or in general management, learning to copy well should be mandatory.

And if you need any greater encouragement, it's always worth remembering, as the stories at the beginning of this introduction demonstrate, copying just happens to be the go-to tool of the great innovators and is part and parcel of making great creative work. It's entirely natural (it's one of our great gifts as a species) and makes great stuff – what more could you ask for, honestly?

If it's good enough for Elvis, Newton, Pullman, Braisfield, Shakespeare and Picasso, isn't it good enough for you?