With another hat on, I’m the Chair of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, and in 2002 our star overseas writer was the Canadian, John Ralston Saul.

A recent book by John is called “On Equilibrium”, and in it he hypotheses that because in recent times we have elevated reason as the pre-imminent human characteristic, we have lost our equilibrium – and that if we were to value all our human characteristics equally – intuition, creativity, imagination, memory, ethics, and common-sense then we might regain our balance, and operate more effectively as individuals, as citizens, and in corporations and governments.

He rails against the evidence-based assessments so beloved by business and governments, and he uses famine as an example of the weakness of evidence-based assessments.

We know enough now about weather patterns, soil composition, people movements and livestock requirements to be able to predict with certainty when a famine will occur anywhere in the world, and thus prevent it.

Instead, we wait for the evidence. We wait until we see stick bodies on the evening news. We demand the proof of enough dead bodies for us to justify calling it a famine, and then we send in the UN.

Now we could come at this another way. If we were to take a common-sense approach, we might not wait for the proof that will surely come, but we might work to prevent it happening in the first place.

And thus, he backs into what I think is a very useful definition of common-sense.

Common-sense is the use of our shared knowledge to predict human behaviour.

Now I know this is a fairly long and circuitous introduction, but I do have a point here.

In recent years, the advertising industry has had the blow-torch of reason applied to our great human characteristics – creativity, intuition and imagination.

As marketers have demanded evidence-based assessments that advertising works, we have found it harder and harder to get work approved that is creative, or imaginative, and we have faced significant pressures to reduce costs, and produce safe, results-focussed work with very little brand-building capability.

Marketers have been seduced by the mantra “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Well sorry, but if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it is demonstrably nonsense.

Over the last decade, billions of dollars have been spent on trying to quantify and manage customer relationships, and the evidence so far seems to indicate that it’s mostly been a waste of money.

The Gartner study indicates that at least 55% of CRM programmes show no results, and a Bain & Co survey in 2001 rated CRM programs in the bottom 3 for satisfaction out of 25 popular business tools, and 20% of managers said it failed to deliver growth, and even damaged long-standing relationships.

Now if we had applied common-sense to the whole issue of customer relations we might never have gone down this treacherous path.

Because common-sense tells you that you can’t measure human relationships, let alone manage them. Let me prove it to you. How much do you love your husband or wife – more than your mother, less than your kids, more than your best mates? Any mother with more than one child will tell you that the notion of measuring relationships is absurd.