The logic of ideas

What do people consider to be a 'good idea'? Often, it's one that is logical, and possibly based on data or evidence. The problem with that is that not all problems have logical answers. The world is full of paradoxes, contradictions, logical fallacies and unintuitive explanations.

The other problem is that ideas are cheap, and people have ideas all the time. Unfortunately, there are many ways you can be wrong about something, and only a small number of ways to be right.

I've worked on plenty of difficult problems. But most of the ideas I've had turned out not to work - despite them being grounded in logic.

Rory Sutherland has a great quote on this:

“If we allow the world to be run by logical people, we will only discover logical things.”

This is quite hard for an engineer to accept who has been trained to be logical. But even in the hard sciences, it sometimes pays off to think differently. Many of the best inventions of the 20th century were discovered by accident, not on purpose - and I think we tend to forget that.

I've come to accept that I can't really judge a good idea as well as I thought. Keep an open mind, fail fast and itterate.