There’s an old proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
If that’s true, then I reckon the highway to hell must be paved with logic.
Like good intentions, it’s not that logic is bad, in and of itself. There is a lot to be said for using logic as part of a decision-making process.
But as part of it. Not all of it.
At least, unless you fancy putting your foot down on the autobahn to oblivion.
Logic alone isn’t enough
Beyond the most trivial of decisions, logic alone isn’t nearly enough.
If you can buy your electricity for £100 or £110, all other components of the deal being identical, then logically you should only spend £100.
But the minute emotions come into play, that becomes a different decision.
What if I’m paying £110 for electricity from exclusively sustainable sources vs £100 for electricity produced from high-sulphur coal?
I’m not taking a view on the rights and wrongs of your choice here, just illustrating that this is a different decision from the pure £100 vs £110 decision because now we’ve introduced an element of emotion, or judgement, or personal preference into the decision.
Not only is logic on its own not enough – virtually no human being makes any decision based on logic alone in our personal lives.
The car you drive, the bread you buy, the house you live in, and pretty much every other decision you make, is based on a range of factors beyond the purely logical ones.
But, ironically, the minute we step into work mode, all other thinking processes tend to get switched off and logic alone becomes the basis for every decision.
There’s a search for objectivity and logical decision-making, in the belief that this is somehow the purest form of the art of leadership.
I’d argue this is more often just the surface appearance of objectivity, and that in reality there’s always a lot more going on than pure logic. But more on that in a moment. First we need to explore what’s going on in more detail.
Presuppositions
Where I see decision-making going badly wrong, it’s not usually the logic that’s wrong.
The logic is usually…erm…perfectly logical…
It’s what happened upstream of that logic being deployed that’s the problem.
You see, logic only generally gets switched on about halfway through a thinking process – the bit before that is usually invisible. Or presented as some sort of fundamental truth in a single bullet point on an introductory slide.
Sometimes that’s because there’s a strong cultural dimension, or universal truth which most people can agree with, at least intellectually. “We should strive to get closer to our customers” is one example – that’s a hard thing to have a fundamental disagreement about.
It would also be fair to say that, a large proportion of the time, the “upstream” stuff is deliberately kept invisible because it’s not in the interests of the person making the proposal to expose that to any potential challenge.
Whether it’s assumed to be a universal truth, or is being deliberately withheld because it’s not in the presenter’s interests to disclose it, the net result is broadly the same.
For the purpose of this article, I’m calling this upstream thinking “presuppositions”. And when things are going badly wrong, it’s usually the presuppositions that have gone skew-whiff.
If you accept the presuppositions as the full and unvarnished truth, the logic from that point onwards is usually…logical. Even if it destroys your bottom line.
An example
To bring this concept to life, let’s imagine someone who sells digital advertising is presenting to you. They want to make a sale.
So their presupposition is likely to be that, whatever the problem, digital advertising is the answer.
“As everyone knows, digital advertising is the future” they might say at the start of their presentation.
“The future” isn’t a logical concept – it’s a fuzzy, uncertain, emotional concept. But the minute they can get you to see yourself in the future, where digital marketing rules supreme, they’re more than halfway along to journey to making a sale to you.
For anything of any importance, we buy with our emotions first, then justify our decisions with logic.
That’s the power of a presupposition. That’s where all the emotions live.
The salesperson for digital ads is likely to show you lots of charts from brand-name consulting firms showing the spend on digital advertising going up and to the right over the last 20 years.
They’ll quote statistics from those same consultancies about stratospheric future growth rates for digital marketing, based on their extensive data modelling and customer surveys.
Here, the salesperson is shoring up the universal truth they would like you to believe with lots of apparently logical reasons to believe them.
After all, why wouldn’t you want to be part of a movement which has grown at a compound 50% per annum for the last 20 years and will continue to grow at the same rate in the next 20, according to a brand-name consultancy?
That’s a movement your career desperately wants to be part of. The power of FOMO kicks in big-time. (Which is exactly their plan, of course.)
While almost all of the presentation appears to be logical – there’s charts, graphs and stats galore – it’s nothing of the sort.
All of this is deliberately designed to appeal to your emotions. They’re hijacking your synapses and getting you to see yourself as a future superstar in the brave new world they set out in front of you.
Up to this point, zero logic has been deployed. Yet the appearance of logic has been used to heighten your emotional state and put the salesperson in the best possible position to make a sale.
What looks like logic in this setting is in fact 100% pure emotion, wrapped in a costume of superficial logic.
But, if the salesperson has done their job well, they can use what is now your shared presupposition that digital advertising is the only possible solution and then set out to demonstrate to you – using actual logic in a logical manner now – that their solution is better than other digital advertising solutions for one reason or another. It’s cheaper, or conversion rates are higher, or whatever.
Finally, logically, inexorably, they put you in a position where you’d be crazy to say “no”. And you get out your chequebook.
That’s the power of a presupposition.
Another example
Several years ago, when I worked in Higher Education, one of my senior colleagues, whose department was in a considerable degree of difficulty, convinced our CEO and board to promote a new course they hoped would attract a stream of students, and therefore revenues for their department.
The problem was they used a term in the course title which might well have been a technically accurate term…it might even have been a term the future employers of our graduates would recognise…but it was a term that no 16-18 year old potential student would ever have heard of, much less know what it meant.
It wasn’t used in school-level textbooks. Teachers didn’t talk about it. And unless the student happened to have a parent or close relative working in the sector, it was extremely unlikely they would have heard it at home either.
This department head’s presupposition was that because they knew the term, and they’d heard it used in industry presentations, everyone knew what it meant.
And to be fair, this wasn’t a completely bonkers idea. By and large, if an employer is looking for people to do Job X and you turn up with a certificate that says you’ve graduated in X, you’re in with a much better chance of getting a job than someone else who turns up with a certificate to demonstrate their expertise in a different field, even a closely-related one.
The problem was employers don’t fill places in Higher Education. 16-18 year-olds do.
My former colleague made the presupposition that because he knew what the term meant, so would everyone else. That was an emotional position, not a logical one.
It may not surprise you to learn virtually nobody signed up for this course. Within the target customer base of 16-18 year-olds, vanishingly small numbers of people knew what the course was about, much less were they prepared to devote several years of their life and several £000s in fees and foregone earnings on the off-chance that a course title they didn’t understand was the route to their future career.
All that said, downstream of the presupposition, all the logical elements worked just fine.
The marketing department used a standard template for course promotion which they had honed over the years, and which they executed to a high standard.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recognise that another presupposition has just been introduced here.
The marketing department’s presupposition was that it was impossible to improve on the course promotion template they had honed over the years. However mostly they were promoting courses that were well-understood by students and teachers – Marketing, Mechanical Engineering, English Literature, and so on.
But their template made no allowance for the fact that they might be promoting a new course in an unchartered area, for a new industry that very few people had heard of up to that point. So they did very little to explain why people should sign up to a programme title which used words nobody in our target market of 16-18 year-olds had ever heard of.
In both cases those presuppositions were wrong. The department head’s presupposition that “everyone knows what this technical word means” and the marketing department’s presupposition that it was impossible to improve on their existing course promotion template.
However, everything downstream of those presuppositions was perfectly logical.
Staff were hired (after all, you can’t teach a course without staff, right?). Significant amounts of money were spent to design and produce leaflets and brochures all about the course. Links were built up with employers to take the steady stream of graduates this department head confidently predicted would be coming on the course. Investment was put into the facilities required to deliver this new course, and so on.
Enormous amounts of time, money and effort were spent on a course that was a flop.
Even though, logically, it should have been a great success. After all, everyone had “done the right things”.
But they forgot that logic is, at best, only part of a decision, and not a very large part of it at that.
The road ahead
That’s why the highway to hell is paved with logic.
Most of the time when I’ve seen something going badly wrong in an organisation, the logic has been reasonable enough. It’s the presupposition that was badly wrong – downstream of that catastrophic oversight, everything made at least some sort of sense.
That’s why, when making decisions, it’s always advisable to go upstream of your starting point and check out the underlying beliefs and emotions at work before you allow the cruise control of logical thinking to highjack your decisions.
Once you get the idea of presuppositions, you see them everywhere.
You see them in your personal life, as well as in your business life.
Perhaps you’re scared of snakes (your presupposition: those things want to eat me) and you have a friend who keeps pet snakes (their presupposition: these things are majestic beasts and won’t do me any harm).
Perhaps you invest heavily in security measures in your retail store (your presupposition: all my customers want to steal from me) yet fewer and fewer customers come to spend their money with you (their presupposition: shopping inside a store that treats me like a criminal is not an enjoyable experience).
Perhaps you’re a prosecutor (your presupposition: the person in the dock is guilty) or a defence lawyer (your presupposition: my client is innocent).
It doesn’t matter what decision you’re trying to make. Logic can’t help if your presupposition is completely wrong – you’ll still make a complete mess of things, despite your impeccable logic.
That’s because there was never a problem with the logic. The problem was with the presupposition which made set the starting point at which logic kicked in.
This is why things go badly wrong for your bottom line.
You end up making a series of expensive decisions which turn out to be completely wrong, because the problem was with your starting point, not with the logic downstream of that.
Check it out
This takes a bit of practice – and it’s not something I can claim I’m perfect on myself. But the only way to counter this entirely logical way of running a business into the ground is to challenge yourself on what presupposition would someone need to make to believe that the course of action being proposed to you is the right one.
And, note of caution, it’s only infrequently going to be the thing the person presenting to you says it is. Because often it’s a blind spot for them too. Like marking our own homework, it’s generally hard for people to spot the holes in their own presuppositions (or, in some cases, that they are even making a presupposition).
At the moment, I’m seeing this a lot with AI.
AI is an entirely logical system (often also based on some pretty shaky “facts”, but that’s not relevant here).
And because it’s designed to be entirely logical, AI can’t conceive that there might be a non-logical dimension to human decision-making.
In large part, that’s because the people who write computer programmes tend to be strong on logical thinking and much weaker on every other sort of processing capability.
The presupposition of tech folk is that logic is the only thing that matters which, in fairness, for writing a computer programme, it is. So they put tremendous effort into making their software do logic even better than it did before.
This is usually presented as some great technological leap forward, such as when new AI models are unveiled amongst much hoopla, when it’s nothing of the sort.
Adding a few more data points into a logical process and doesn’t create a thinking process which transcends logic. It’s just logic with more data points.
So, if you’re thinking about turning your business over to AI, which some purveyor of magic beans has convinced you is the future because a “brand name” consulting firm has written a report which says it is, just remember this…
If you say “yes” you are implicitly accepting that logic is the only thing that matters in your business, and the only thing your clients care about.
And, without pushing too hard, I can demonstrate that presupposition is garbage.
If I have a problem with a purchase I’ve made, let’s say, I want my problem solving fast and, ideally, empathetically. I don’t want it solving logically, except to the extent that it facilitates what I really want (fast and empathetic).
That, by the way, is why chatbots are quite probably the worst possible “innovation” in customer service.
I rarely find one which solves my problem at all – yes, even the ones with cute and funny human names – never mind doing so quickly and empathetically. Chatbots, I probably don’t need to say, are entirely logical in nature which is why they are mostly hopeless as a customer service function.
My refund
I had a dreadful experience with a major hotel chain recently which was logically perfect (from their perspective), I’m sure, but about as bad as it could possibly be from a customer perspective.
Long story short: they took the payment for my room twice.
I contacted the hotel the same day (I didn’t notice it until I checked the notifications on my phone on my journey home) and pointed out their error. Naturally, I asked for a refund.
What followed was a month of “computer says no”.
Impeccably logical from their point of view, I’m sure: “our systems are that you need to wait 7-10 days while we process your refund request”…”until the finance director has signed off the payment we can’t issue you a refund” …”we are waiting for an update from our payment systems”…”we have issued the payment which should be with you in the next few days” (no payment was received)… and so on.
In all this, bear in mind the error was unequivocally theirs. Even the reception desk admitted that they had made an error.
Yet I had to fight with a series of logical processes inside this hotel group to get my own money paid back to me.
As an experienced CFO, I could imagine what the logical processes were inside the hotel group. And they were arguably fair enough if the payment request was coming from, say, a supplier who was chasing up payment of their account.
But I also have the experience to know that if anyone really cared, I could have had the payment they took in error refunded the same day. There is no great technical challenge about doing that, and I’ve done that myself a handful of times in my career when I’ve been on the other side of similar mistakes.
However, this hotel chain allowed a purely logical mindset to overwhelm all the other considerations at play here.
Net result: I’m unlikely to stay with that hotel chain any time soon, depriving them of revenue.
Even though I’m sure this hotel chain is proud of its efficiency in financial process, proud of their internal controls to make sure “just anyone” can’t make payments through their financial systems, and proud of their treasury management systems which means they hold onto cash for as long as they can before paying it out…even though all those purely logical decisions are, at some level, commendable, they completely missed the point.
In the highly competitive hospitality market, cheesing off your best customers is never a smart move for your bottom line.
Yet, despite “doing everything right” from their point of view, I’m sure, they’ve lost my business and, because I’ve told this story a few times now, they’ve lost business from other people too.
Beyond the level of trivial decisions, almost no problem can be solved by the use of logic alone. Logic needs to be part of the process, of course. But using only logic when there’s much bigger issues at stake, and in the face of a less-than-well-founded set of presuppositions, puts you firmly on the on-ramp of the highway to hell.
When organisations collapse, it’s rarely because they’re not being logical enough.
In the times I’ve seen that happen up close, it’s always been because they are being too logical and overlooking all the more important elements impacting their business, its people, and its customers.
That’s why logic alone is bad news for your bottom line.