Let's Make This More Interesting The Power of Surprise - Part 2 (with Rory Sutherland)
Apr 7, 2026
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and behavioural science evangelist, shares wild, counterintuitive ideas. He talks about why marketing returns are fat-tailed and how small surprises can have huge impact. Expect discussions on attention economics, making teams luckier, reframing problems, and when cheap, memorable touches beat costly infrastructure.
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The £300,000 Rubber Duck Killed A Distinctive Delight
- Virgin Atlantic's rubber ducks became a signature delight until procurement labelled it the '£300,000 rubber duck' and cut it.
- Rory reframes value as cost per noticing passenger, showing small delights can be extremely cheap attention buys.
Give Creative Teams Slack To Maximize Lucky Breakthroughs
- Increase the probability of serendipity by deliberately allocating time for creative exploration.
- Let creative teams have slack rather than maximizing utilization so they can stumble on breakthrough ideas.
Good Algorithms Must Balance Explore And Exploit
- Algorithms risk removing surprise by over-optimizing exploit over explore.
- A good algorithm would balance explore-exploit and occasionally show wildcards to avoid boredom and preserve discovery.