Rationality is the bronze standard

In most businesses, rationality is the gold standard of human thinking.

If you win an argument, if you sound rational, that's often the best you can hope to be.

Rationality is safe.

It is easy to defend.

It sounds intelligent in a meeting.

It gives people confidence that no one is doing anything stupid.

But I think in the design industry, rationality is only the bronze standard.

It's okay.

A rational solution will probably be fine.

You won't get fired.

You won't get blamed.

It will work.

But it is still only the bronze standard.

The silver standard is ingenuity.

And the gold standard is magic.

The problem is that most companies are not built to create magic.

They are built to protect themselves from being wrong.

The rational people have the power of veto.

The creative people only have the power of suggestion.

And that is not a fair fight.

The creative person has to explain why something new could work.

The rational person only has to explain why it might fail.

And we usually won't do the risky thing because you get much more blame for being eccentric than you do for being boring.

If you do something strange and it fails, everyone remembers that it was strange.

If you do something boring and it fails, it was still a reasonable decision.

So we optimize for decisions that are easy to explain.

Easy to defend.

Easy to survive.

And that creates a world full of products that are perfectly rational.

And completely forgettable.

This matters even more now because AI is changing what rationality is worth.

AI is becoming extraordinarily good at rational thinking.

It can analyze.

Compare.

Research.

Challenge assumptions.

Find risks.

Write the argument.

Make the business case.

Explain why one option is more logical than another.

So rationality is becoming abundant.

And when something becomes abundant, its value changes.

At the same time, AI is going to be an assault on human employment in the service industry.

More and more interactions between businesses and customers will become automated.

Support.

Sales.

Booking.

Banking.

Shopping.

Administration.

A machine will answer immediately.

A machine will know the context.

A machine will never be tired.

And I fundamentally believe that as human interaction becomes scarcer and scarcer, the importance of person-to-person interaction between a business and a customer will become disproportionately higher and higher.

A real person will start to feel expensive.

A real conversation will feel premium.

Someone remembering your name will matter more.

Someone actually caring about the outcome will matter more.

The more automation we have, the more valuable humanity becomes.

And I think exactly the same thing is going to happen in product development.

The more AI gives us rational answers, the less valuable a merely rational answer becomes.

The world does not need another perfectly defensible product.

It needs more ingenuity.

More eccentricity.

More people willing to suggest something that does not yet have evidence behind it.

More people willing to create something that cannot be justified before it exists.

Because rationality can tell you whether an idea makes sense.

But it cannot always tell you whether an idea has magic.

And magic is difficult to defend in a meeting.

You cannot put it easily in a spreadsheet.

You cannot always explain why people will love something before they love it.

Sometimes you can only feel that there is something there.

That is why I think the hierarchy changes in the age of AI.

Rationality is the bronze standard.

It is necessary.

But it is becoming cheap.

Ingenuity is the silver standard.

It requires seeing something others do not see.

And magic is the gold standard.

Magic is when something feels obvious after somebody has had the courage to make it.

When people love it before they can fully explain why.

When a product feels human in a world that is becoming increasingly automated.

When something creates an emotional response that no rational argument could have produced on its own.

The world is dominated by people who don't believe in magic.

And maybe that is exactly why there is so little of it.