Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation To Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges by Sam Tatam

About the Book

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake?

In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways.

Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and dorsal fin, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and advertisers have toiled to solve many of the problems you face today.

Over time, through intent, design, social learning, and sheer luck, we have found what works.

Armed with an enhanced ability to see these patterns in human innovation, we can now systematically approach the creative process to develop more effective ideas more readily and rapidly.

In the same way, Japanese engineers reduced bullet train noise by studying the evolved biology of the owl and kingfisher, today we can see how Disney improved the queueing experience in the same way Houston airport made arrivals feel faster (while making people walk further).

You’ll learn how the chocolate at the bottom of a Cornetto ice cream can improve an Error 404 message, and what a bowl of M&Ms has in common with a canary in a coal mine.

These are Evolutionary Ideas.

Exploring five of the most critical challenges we face today, you’ll learn how to ‘breed’ more effective solutions from those that have survived. The result is a dynamic and exciting way of solving problems and supercharging creativity – for anyone in any endeavor.

About the Author

Sam Tatam is the Global Head of Behavioural Science at Ogilvy. His passion is understanding human behavior, and his experience comes from organizational /industrial psychology and advertising strategy.

From New York to Nairobi, Sam has led behavior change projects across virtually every category and continent. Today, he leads a global team of talented psychologists and behavioral economists to develop interventions and shape the communications of some of the world’s most influential brands and organizations.

And, interesting fact – the first draft of this book to his publisher contained a typo – in the headline!

Listen to the Interview…

Links…

• Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation To Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges by Sam Tatam (Amazon)
• Sam Tatam (LinkedIn)
• Sam Tatam (Twitter)
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
• Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
• Genrikh Altshuller
• TRIZ Methodology
• The Streisand effect
• The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science
• From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans by Jon Picoult (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
• The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath
• Magic Castle Hotel (Hollywood, CA)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

It may seem that big problems require big solutions, but ad man Rory Sutherland says many flashy, expensive fixes are just obscuring better simpler answers. To illustrate, he uses behavioral economics and hilarious examples.

Mary Poppins beautifully demonstrates the concept of “psychological reactance”…

P.S. – If you have rated and reviewed the podcast on Apple Podcasts, please let me return the favor and mail you some Marketing Book Podcast bookmarks and laptop stickers. Just click here to provide your postal address (I’ll send it anywhere in the world)! ~Douglas Burdett, host of The Marketing Book Podcast.

Don’t know how to leave an iTunes review? It’s easy – click here for simple instructions.