Rory Sutherland thinks a longer train ride can beat a shorter one
Engineers spent billions making the London-to-Paris train faster. Rory Sutherland had a cheaper idea — and it wasn't about the train at all.
The Eurostar from London to Paris takes around two hours and fifteen minutes. For years, engineers and transport planners debated how to shorten it. The answer involved billions in infrastructure investment.
Rory Sutherland, the advertising strategist and author of Alchemy, proposed a different question: what if instead of shortening the journey, you made it more enjoyable? Serve world-class food. Hire superb sommeliers. Add Wi-Fi fast enough to work comfortably. At some point, he argued, passengers would actively prefer the train to take longer.
This is the logic of reframing. Engineers optimize the objective variable — speed, cost, efficiency. Sutherland's point is that humans don't experience the world through objective variables. They experience it through perception, context, and meaning. A fast, uncomfortable train and a slow, delightful one are not the same product at different speeds; they are different products entirely.
Sutherland calls this "psycho-logic" — the idea that the rational solution and the human solution are often miles apart. Altering how something feels is frequently cheaper, faster, and more effective than altering the underlying reality. The bottle of Tabasco on the airplane meal changes the meal. The informative estimated arrival time makes the wait tolerable. Neither solution touches the food or the traffic.