Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit

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.

01. Fear of Being Wrong : Our decisions are often driven by Loss Aversion – the cognitive bias that makes us more afraid of failure than excited by potential success. In a world where a single misstep can get us “bollocked,’ we stick with what feels safe, even when it’s clearly not working.

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

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

We’re actively sabotaging ourselves.

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

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.

04. 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.

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