Rory Sutherland: When obvious truths are invisible

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Here’s something I genuinely don’t understand – and, given that the readers of this publication must include many astute people with the greatest possible experience of the vagaries of human decision-making, I thought I might share it with you in the hope of enlightenment.

A few years ago, I asked a collection of rail engineers: “What is the point of High Speed 2?”

“Very simple,” they replied: “To increase capacity, and to reduce journey times.”

“Fine,” I said. “But you do realise you can do that not only at a cost of £60-100bn with a project that will take 15 years, but in six months for £3-4m?”

I elucidated further. “All you need to do to achieve these two ends is simple: reformulate the problem so that journey time is defined not as time spent on a train, but as end-to-end journey time. Once you do that, you can reduce travel time for perhaps 50% of passengers by 20-40 minutes, at minimal cost, without making the trains any faster. At the same time, you will significantly increase the capacity of the existing rail network and reduce the likelihood of overcrowding. Again, this will cost you little more than £3-4m and will only take six months.”

They looked on in disbelief. But let me explain my proposal. Every time I travel to Manchester, I buy an advance ticket. The reason I do this is simple: if you don’t, your journey will cost about £300 per leg. The downside, of course, is that this requires you to travel on a specified train.

As a result, because I cannot afford to risk missing that train, I leave a huge margin of error and arrive from Kent at Euston station about 45 minutes before my train is due to leave. In that time, two trains leave, 20 and 40 minutes respectively before my designated train, and usually half-empty. But I’m not allowed to board them – no siree. So, I have to hang around the forecourt looking like a prat. Those 40 minutes are much more annoying and less productive than 40 minutes spent on a train.

If you spent £200,000 producing an app, and a few million pounds advertising its existence, you could solve this problem. It would work like this. As soon as I arrive at Euston, I could notify the chaps at Avanti West Coast Trains, and they could offer me the option, if capacity were available, to board one of the two earlier trains. You could even charge a small fee.

I would, therefore, have reduced my journey time by 20 or 40 minutes. Better still, by taking an earlier, empty seat, I would have increased the capacity of the network. Why? Well, here’s the thing. It’s something that is completely obvious with cars, buses, coaches and even helicopters, but for some reason it’s completely non-obvious when it comes to trains.

Suppose you had a fleet of taxis waiting to take people from a wedding to a reception, and there was a queue of people. You would obviously fill each car with as many people as were available at the time of departure. You wouldn’t allow cars to leave part-full if there were people waiting in line.

The same would apply with buses and helicopters. If you’re evacuating the US embassy compound in Saigon, you make sure every helicopter leaves with a full complement of passengers, because that way you’re maximising the use of available capacity. You wouldn’t let a helicopter leave half-empty and tell the 50 desperate people waiting ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you’re booked on the 16:07 departure’. You’d fill each Chinook.

Why is this not obvious when it comes to trains? That’s my first question: I want to know what this phenomenon is (‘domain-blindness’?) where we can see something absolutely clearly in one setting, but, in a different setting, that once obvious truth is now practically invisible.

Here’s my second question. When I propose this jump-the-wait app idea to rail engineers, I’m careful to caveat it by saying, “I’m not suggesting for a second that you don’t need to build HS2, but wouldn’t it make sense to do this app thingy in the meantime?” How come they don’t disagree with me, or refute my argument, but simply dismiss what I have to say? Is it that by recontextualising or reconceptualising a problem, you are somehow seen as cheating – of not playing by the rules? It’s worrying if so, because this process is at the heart of most creative problem-solving, and a great deal of marketing works the same way.

If anybody can think of other instances of these phenomena – or, equally, if anybody knows a name for them – I’d really like to know. Contact me @rorysutherland on Twitter.

This column was first published in the July 2021 issue of Impact.