An excellent piece – Why do smart people do stupid things? It’s
simple by Andre Spicer
“For more than a
decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing
smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent
people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults
enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that
wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more
attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the
armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises;
headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating
students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving
problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring
for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their
jobs as being dumb.”