Mind blowing discussion with brilliant mind Rory Sutherland on creativity and logic

Today I had the chance to have a deep discussion with Rory Sutherland who is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy about logic and creativity. He gave an excellent talk about behavioural economics at the Ögilvy FUEL event. In his talk he gave many examples of how logic is placed at highest priority in our society but in the real world logic can only answer a small subset of problems and creativity is required to find solutions. As an engineer I wanted to find out what he thought we could solve by logic. Since engineers are taught in logic. After a long discussion it seems that problems that fall under the category of newtonian physics can be solved by logic. But almost all problems in life involve non linearity and humans and therefore we need a combination of creativity and logic. A good example is someone turning the screw on your airplane wheels. We don’t need (or want) creativity in that case because it has a well proven logical solution, and following that logic is required for the system to work (and not crash the plane). But even in this case creativity should be applied at a META level. For example, maybe some other way of turning the screw is more efficient. But for most systems which are non newtonian and involve humans we need creativity. For example the air France crash where a logical control design didn’t take into account an opposite control signal to logical controller and the plane crashed. Or something simple like the problem that a school had that the corridors were too crowded. The logic solution will analyze increase corridor width etc. The creative solution is to stagger class times so all the students are not walking at the same time.
Rory recommended to read the Nobel Prize winning acceptance speech on The limits of information. It is at this link http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Rory said actually engineers are very good at understanding the limits of information. Because we have to deal with complex and human systems (although I think a lot of academic engineering ignores this and is in its own unreal world). He said the worst is finance people who want to reduce everything to numbers.
I was deeply impressed with the brilliant mind of Rory Sutherland. It really impacts the way I will look at the world.