Rory Sutherland on why being delightfully less wrong beats being boringly right

Let me reacquaint you with MAD//Masters by, well… me, Rory Sutherland.

Imagine if a course, a consultancy, and a very dry martini had a slightly eccentric, highly opinionated baby. That’s MAD//Masters: a heady cocktail of behavioural science, creative provocation, and strategic heresy - shaken, not stirred, with a healthy dash of irreverence.

This isn’t just another box-ticking online course. It’s ten sharp, snackable modules, garnished with monthly live sessions and a frankly ridiculous amount of bonus content. Think of it as your passport to weaponising irrationality, ethically, of course.

Will it give you the “right” answer every time? Good Lord, no. But it will make you delightfully, usefully less wrong. And in a world obsessed with optimisation, being less wrong is often the best possible advantage.

What’s it all for? To help you take a step back, so you can leap forward. We’ll dive into the murky depths of human psychology, unearth the creative ideas your MBA politely ignored, and build frameworks that actually work in the messy, unpredictable real world of tech and marketing.

Those who’ve done it? They say it’s transformed their thinking, made their strategies braver, their brands bolder, and their PowerPoints much more tolerable. They've discovered that risk, when properly understood, is a feature not a bug, and that data, while useful, is a bit like a lamppost for a drunk: better for support than illumination.

In short: if you're ready to challenge orthodoxy, charm uncertainty, and learn how to think (not just follow the herd), I’ll see you inside. 

I don’t really aspire to be right. In fact, I positively recoil at the idea. Being “right” is hideously overrated. What I do aim for, if anything, is to be interestingly, usefully, delightfully less wrong. You see, the cult of being right has led modern business thinking into a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac. It’s a bit like trying to do oil painting with a calculator.

Now, here’s the odd thing: most business decisions aren’t made to discover the best course of action, they’re made to win arguments. And what wins arguments? Well, it’s not nuance, ambiguity, or the gentle admission that the world is a messy and context-laden place. No, it’s the ability to reduce things to tidy little variables you can stuff into a PowerPoint and call “evidence”. It’s GCSE maths masquerading as strategy.

But real strategy, actual strategy, involves trade-offs. It’s saying, “We’re going to do this and, by definition, not that.” Like choosing to sell a few things at a high margin, or many things at a low one. That’s a strategic choice. Saying “we’ll offer great customer service” isn’t a strategy. That’s a platitude. No one ever said, “Our bold new market differentiator is being actively awful to our customers.”

And this is where rational argument lets us down. It doesn’t cope well with trade-offs. To win an argument, you have to pretend there’s only one right answer, which is a bit like trying to choose wine with an Excel spreadsheet. You’ll end up sober and sad. Far better, I think, to entertain competing ideas, not because one is “right” and the other “wrong”, but because their juxtaposition makes the decision richer, more human, and occasionally… brilliant.

If the mere notion of this kind of thinking gives you that curious, almost illicit frisson of intellectual arousal (the kind that doesn’t require a follow-up meeting with HR), then for heaven’s sake, stop faffing about and CLICK HERE to secure your place. 

Alternatively, if you're feeling unusually magnanimous, or simply fancy becoming the sort of legend whispered about with awe in strategy meetings, have a word with my extraordinarily capable co-conspirator, Sam Benton, at sam@madfestlondon.com about getting your team involved. Remember, our alumni of Expedia, Nestlé, Amazon, and Sky didn’t conquer the world by playing it safe and thinking like spreadsheet-wielding actuaries. They got there by daring to be just irrational enough.