The Irrationality Illusion

My crying baby taught me about irrationality.

“Why does he keep crying?”, I shouted to my wife over the howls.

“He must need something. Have you checked his nappy?”, she responded patiently.

“Yes! I’ve checked everything: sleep, hunger, nappy! He’s just being irrational.”

“Have you tried holding him? Maybe he needs connection...?”

As I held my baby and looked into his handsome, tear-stricken eyes, his cries were quickly replaced with giggles and gurgles.

Something in my head clicked.

In 1957, Russell Ackoff investigated the high birth rate in India, which equated to an average of 4.4 children per family. With birth control being widely available, the prevalent explanation was that the Indian population was irrational.

This explanation was not only uncharacteristic and unfair, but also unconstructive: if researchers accepted that the Indian population was too irrational to use birth control, they were also accepting nothing can be done to reduce population growth.

Ackoff suggests: “I have never seen a problem believed to be caused by the behaviour of others that could be solved by assuming that they were irrational. On the other hand, by assuming that we are irrational, solutions to these problems can often be found.”

Through further exploration with a local Indian demographer, they together arrived at a new theory that was quickly validated:

Indian adults expected to be unemployed in later life. With no social security programme, and with wages being too low to save for unemployed years, unemployed parents could only rely on support from children in later life.

On average, 1.1 wage-earning children were necessary to support each adult - 2.2 per family. However, in 1957, females were not perceived as employable. With 1 in 2 children being female, each family hence needed to have 4.4 children to support 2 unemployed parents later in life. This expected figure matched reality.

In business, when software isn’t adopted by our customers, or our organisational change is not adopted by our staff, it is easy to assume those customers and staff are irrational. This is not only uncharacteristic and unfair, but also unconstructive.

The takeaway? People are good, and people are rational. If we believe otherwise, we forgo the ability to understand and improve reality - and make babies gurgle.