Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit

How much of our work exists because we ‘think’ we have to do it?

When curiosity is at tension with productivity, and play is eclipsed by monetization, we get nothing good.

As Rory Sutherland sees it,

“People effectively are laser focused on the things they can get bollocked for. And it's much, much easier to get bollocked for being illogical than it is to get bollocked for being unimaginative.

You can't bollock

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To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense. Ma... See more

How to Dissent

Simply, we need to ask three questions:

Why are we doing this?

Who is this for?

Does this matter to them?

We’ve sacrificed nuanced judgment for a trend report without a methodology.

We’ve sacrificed white space thinking for whatever the average is doing.

And we’ve sacrificed the attributes we care most about (resonance, loyalty, fandom, influence and impact) for the metrics easily available to us (clicks, views and follows).

As Rick Rubin puts it,

“If you

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As marketer and author Rory Sutherland puts it, many of the problems we face today are open ended. Yet we aren’t actually looking to solve these problems.

Instead, we’re looking to win arguments . Or as I put it, we’re looking to maintain our employer’s health insurance. Don’t rock the boat.

The Illusion of Progress : Action Bias leads us to believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing , even when the action doesn’t actually move us forward. We equate busyness with productivity, mistaking motion for progress, and perceive novelty as innately valuable.

Today, we’re not just creatively stunted, inefficient and unsatisfied...

We’re actively sabotaging ourselves.

And worse, we’re calling it business as usual.

To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense. Ma... See more