Thank you to my friend Bill Keller of Staffing Global for sharing this video with us!
What if some of the most effective business decisions we can make don’t feel logical at first?
This idea has been occupying my thoughts lately, especially as I read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. In it, he challenges our deep reliance on logic in business and suggests that truly innovative solutions often start in the realm of the illogical. That tension between what feels rational and what actually works is where opportunity lives.
It’s also where global staffing comes into the picture. As I illustrate in the video, your experiences, perspectives or even your biases with global staffing can land in any of Sutherland’s four quadrants:
Logical and effective
Illogical and effective
Logical but ineffective
Illogical and ineffective
That’s what makes it so interesting and also so complex. And complexity, I’ve come to realize, doesn’t mean something is wrong. It often just means we need to explore it further.
Many of us are conditioned to trust only what makes sense on paper. We focus almost exclusively on the “logical and works” quadrant, and often ignore the “illogical but works” space. That’s the one Sutherland calls “alchemy.” But that’s where breakthrough ideas are hiding in plain sight.
So let’s talk about the hesitations that often come with global staffing: language barriers, cultural differences, time zones and client impressions to name a few. These concerns are real. They’re true. But they’re not the truth.
As Andy Andrews points out in The Bottom of the Pool, we can miss out by focusing on partial truths. Just because something is difficult or counterintuitive doesn’t mean it isn’t the best option.
We need to think more deeply about how we make decisions. Are we defaulting to what’s comfortable and logical? Or are we willing to explore options that might not seem obvious but could work beautifully?
Watch the video to rethink how you approach complex business decisions and discover why what feels illogical might be exactly what works.
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