Do you feel like your organisation is full of smart people doing stupid things? If so, you’re not alone. Research by Cass Business School has found that people working in knowledge-intensive public sector organisations – from local authorities to police forces to schools – frequently report that their colleagues spend much of their time doing stupid things. In fact, these smart people even admit to doing many stupid things themselves.
The sector is full of examples. The investigation into the Bank of England’s response to the financial crisis found that junior staff knew about many of the risks beforehand – but had been discouraged from raising potential problems. Schools constantly prioritise pleasing Ofsted inspectors over educating their students. Frontline civil servants seek to play the smallest possible role in projects which are both too big to question, and too ill-founded to succeed. Plans that are easily explained triumph over those with more complex foundations, even when they’re less likely to work in practice.
The people acting in these ways don’t have low IQs; most are highly intelligent. But they work in organisations seized by a culture of what we can call ‘functional stupidity’. These cultures encourage intelligent people to narrow their capacity for critical thinking, because doing so enables them to get things done. In these circumstances people are actively discouraged from asking about the end purpose of an activity, requesting or giving reasonable justifications and explanations of the projects they’re pursuing, or questioning the assumptions underlying an idea or project.
Switching off the capacity for critical thinking can produce many positive results for organisations, at least in the short term. It helps individuals to put aside doubts and focus on getting the job done, and organisations to sideline tough questions which might lead to conflict and confusion. This means people are able to work together efficiently and in relative harmony.
However, functional stupidity has many dangers. Employees can’t use their entire skillset, and frequently despair at the flawed decisions they see around them. They’re also encouraged to overlook small problems or errors – something that’s acceptable on the fringes, but can allow small problems to accumulate into a larger crisis. And because lower-ranking staff in such organisations aren’t encouraged to question flawed decisions or processes, managers can remain unaware of their organisation’s weaknesses until those crises erupt; at which point, they’re completely surprised and thus ill-equipped to deal with them.
So how can leaders avoid these risks? Seasoned leaders don’t have a one-size-fits-all rule, but seek to strike a balance between critical thinking and mindless doing depending on the needs of the hour. In novel, surprising or high impact situations, they give far more space and time to critical thinking. In more routine and everyday situations, there’s less emphasis on asking difficult questions.
Good leaders also distribute the capacity for critical thinking – so that lower-ranking staff are asking tough questions – and create channels for concerns to reach senior leaders. In many organisations where functional stupidity is rife, employees are routinely told to create ‘solutions, not problems’; but in many cases they can see the latter, without having the power to make the former. Junior staff must be able to communicate problems upwards – and senior staff must listen: they will gain an early warning system.
To strengthen critical thinking, leaders can routinely require well-developed justifications to be put forward addressing the potential challenges to a proposed course of action. Does a plan make logical sense? Do we have good evidence? What can we learn from past experiences? Can we pilot it? Business cases must consider not just an approach’s strengths, but also its weaknesses and risks.
Further down the tree, team members should be encouraged to ask substantive questions about their tasks. What is the purpose of what we’re doing? What might be the unintended consequences? Does it need to be done at all? When team members have answers to these bigger questions, they’re likely to find tasks more meaningful and motivating.
Alongside formal exercises such as these, leaders and their teams should regularly question the assumptions that underpin their strategy, structures and processes. What are the facts we must assume are true for our current course of action to make sense? What information are we basing our decisions on? Does that information only show a partial picture? What is the assumed ideal state we are moving towards? Is this realistic or desirable? By asking these questions, it is possible to identify some of the assumptions underlying decisions and projects. If these appear to be shaky, the course of action may need rethinking.
Asking for and giving justifications, considering ends and questioning assumptions are all hard to do. They take time; they can be threatening, both to ourselves and to others; they can spark conflict, and undermine some of the faith in a course of action. But encouraging critical thinking can give employees a sense of the purpose of their work which boosts motivation. And by creating more robust solutions, it can help leaders to address potential problems before they emerge, suddenly, in a crisis.
Andre Spicer is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Cass Business School, City University London