The Law of Irrationality at Work

Over the past few years, I’ve been investing time in developing and applying proven mental models from the books I read

Last Week, I picked up Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature. Now as a learning exercise, I decided to explain each law through my own experiences.

Greene’s central argument is clear: we are not creatures of logic but of emotion. Beneath our polished, rational surface lie deep impulses that quietly drive our behavior.

In The Law of Irrationality, Greene explains that most decisions stem from emotion, our need to win, to fit in, to avoid standing out and later on we dress them up with logic.

This law reminded me of my initial days in Ola, where I learnt a simple lesson that if you’re trying to win an emotional argument with a spreadsheet, you’ve already lost.

We’ve all been there: you have the data, you have the answer, but the team is pushing in the exact opposite direction.

When I joined Ola in 2015 to manage operations across West India, the company was in the middle of a “growth sprint.” The CEO’s directive was simple: Add as many cabs as possible in the next 30 days.

Across cities, this strategy worked well: more cabs meant shorter ETAs and higher bookings. So, as the new guy, I threw myself into the plan with full enthusiasm across Mumbai and Pune cities.

Over the next few days, as I got to know the Mumbai market, I realized that within Mumbai “More Cabs ≠ Growth”. Most bookings in Mumbai were long-distance, and our pricing was about 30% higher than Uber’s.

In my mind, the fix was obvious: fix pricing, then add cabs. And that’s when I hit the brick wall.

Being new, I lacked the credibility to shift the conversation. I knew it was not possible to stop the ongoing More Cabs=Growth Initiative and had to just wait patiently.

However, through quiet chats, I discovered the corporate marketing team had also proposed a pricing change and had been turned down. That’s when I knew I had allies and I just needed the right moment.

Two weeks later, that moment came. Finance flagged an unexpected rise in expenses. The company was giving new phones to drivers to use Ola app (smartphones were still not that common within driver community), and stock meant for six months had vanished in three week

So the finance team decided to investigate if this initiative was actually leading to growth, only to realise that around 80% of the new cabs were inactive after one week.

All the ‘good growth’ we were seeing? It primarily came from around 10–25% increase in bookings from existing cabs, not the new ones. This broke the emotional spell across everyone

Seizing the opening, I worked with corporate marketing to reintroduce the pricing plan, not as opposition but as a possible alternate solution. Now the same data was viewed more critically and, it was approved almost immediately.

The results were clear: once pricing was rationalized, bookings grew, and soon, the pricing was reworked across major cities.

Now within an organisation, when a leader is committed to an idea, the team’s “rationality” is often just a mask for their emotional desire to conform.

When facing emotional group think, your goal is not to shout louder, it’s to navigate smarter.

So how do we go about when faced with such a situation:

• First, diagnose the fight. If your data isn’t working, you’re in an emotional or political battle, not a logical one.
• Second, find your hidden allies. Look for other teams who have already fought this battle and lost; they are your coalition.
• Third, find the “smoking gun.” Look for the one metric (often from Finance or tech or product team) that will create a rational “pause” and reframe the entire debate.
• Seize that pause.

The real influence lies not in being the loudest voice in the room, but the calmest one — clear, patient, and armed with the one truth that can’t be ignored.