Being Unreasonable In Four Easy Steps

Nothing will ever change unless you’re prepared to be a bit more unreasonable, says Ogilvy & Mather’s creative chief.

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (George Bernard Shaw). Just to be clear, being unreasonable isn’t an excuse to be awful. To clarify further, there’s good unreasonable and bad unreasonable. Good unreasonable is being uncompromising, challenging, demanding of yourself and others, dissatisfied, restless and honest. Bad unreasonable is being uninformed (the most intransigent arguments are usually the result of an uninformed view point), biased, arrogant and political.

The history of everything tells us that unless you are prepared to be unreasonable, nothing changes. No fresh thoughts will be formed. Jobs, Gandhi, Kubrick: heroes of unreasonable. It’s unlikely that they worried too much about maintaining the status quo at the expense of progress.

Then why, as an industry founded on the pursuit of fresh thinking, aren’t we all unreasonable all of the time? Because it involves risk, which we are hard wired to avoid – the risk of conflict, failure, even humiliation.