"My second example is, if you take the train travel example, okay. If you work in any sort of creative industry: if you’re a copywriter, or you’re, you know, an inventor, if you’re in any kind of creative process, it’s absolutely assumed that you have to present your thinking to people who are much more rational and practical than you. Does it stack out, what are the cost benefits, blah-de-blah-de-blah. Okay? Now, that’s kind of all right. However, what’s interesting is, it never happens the other way around. If you’ve got a bunch of rational people, like engineers, sitting there, deciding, “What I think we’ll do is spend 24 billion to increase the speed of trains through London and Birmingham.” What interesting is that no one ever asks those people and says, “Okay. Well, you’ve done all your rational work, but before we allow you to go and put that into practice, let’s just show your solution to loads of wacky crazy people to see if they can come up with something better.” So what you have is evidence of a double standard. You have an example where you have a double standard where crazy people have to present their work to rational people, but this does not apply the other way around. Do you buy that argument, that you should just as soon temper rational thinking as you do crazy thinking? The same should apply backwards."
TED Blog | Listen to creative people: Q&A with Rory Sutherland
