On May 14^th, I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the iStrategy conference in The Hague. One of the highlights was listening to Rory Sutherland give the opening keynote address. His talk was titled “The Next Revolution Won’t Be Technological – But Psychological” and he challenged the digital savvy audience with a different point of view on where to look for new ways of making digital work for business and marketing, and for new ways to drive innovation.

Rory had a strong set of case studies and arguments for what I would broadly paraphrase as “use more psychology and less spreadsheets” when making any online experience. Think about real people, not just models. He said we should be looking at models of human behavior over those from static or neoclassical economics. To support his broad point he shared a great video about the McGurk Effect, which is defined on Wikipedia as:

a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception

Here is the video Rory showed of the McGurk Effect in action:

My big take-away from the McGurk Effect is that visual stimuli or visual solutions can be very powerful, use them wisely but use them knowing they can also trick the brain. One could stretch this to effect to show that one of the reasons photo sharing and video is such a massive user segment in the digital space is we find photos to be more accurate, have more depth and are more pleasing than just audio or written content.

 A picture is worth a thousand words

The other three big take away points for me from Rory’s keynote where:

1. Control can lead to more satisfaction, even the perception of more control. The point of control is really all about choices and how we make them or they are made for us by someone else – be that a company, a government or a website designer. There is a larger field around this notion of “Choice Architecture” with several popular books on this topic, such as Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Nudge Richard Thaler.
2. The “Sweet Spot” is between Psychology, Technology and Economics. By the sweet spot, I believe Rory, was trying to point out that in a complex technological world we need to take into account all three areas when designing anything. A new product, a new tax system or a new website.
3. We often forget the value of psychology. Basically perception is everything. Check out Rory’s great TED talk on this subject to hear more.

In summary, I was left with lots of questions and wishing Mr Sutherland would continue speaking. I was also given renewed belief that we should look to psychology and behavior economics, more of the time when finding was to optimize e-commerce experiences or designing our digital world in general.

All the presentations from the iStrategy conf. including Rory’s can be downloaded here.