Never Underestimate the Power of Stupidity (or: If you are on the road to hell, don’t go faster!)
“FUNCTIONAL STUPIDITY”, says Mats Alvesson, is an ORGANISED SYSTEM THAT STOPS PEOPLE FROM SERIOUSLY REFLECTING ABOUT WHAT THEY DO AT WORK.
In a recent conversation about whether “slashing bureaucracy” is the most opportune intervention modern CEOs should consider, I warned that agility is not “effectiveness”. We are at risk of becoming functionally stupid in a system that glorifies “quantitative efficiency”. As leaders, we must not mistake maximising profit – which is simply about paying back savvy “capitalists” for their alleged risk – for purpose; or return on equity for responsibility. Some of the most important things in our human lives money will not buy – value is not price, and our limited time on this earth is endlessly precious.
Hence, what matters in modern business is not only agility, but responsibility. Not only to deliver results or satisfy customers, but what results we deliver, how. A wise leader must understand that responsibility is not only for output – but for the existential quality of the entire process of generating outcomes.
With all due respect to those polaroid opinions about what businesses and leaders should do, we have often made our (business) life far too simple by creating fictitious dichotomies: “Human life” has suddenly become “labour” and “resource”. “Human relationships and flourishing” have become “market” and “money”. Planet and nature are now “land” and “property”. All of that comes nicely packaged by a perversely seductive and fundamentally irrational “instrumental rationalism” – suggesting that “homo oeconomicus” is all we are and what life is about.
Wake up, leaders of this planet! That is dystopia. It is not true, and it ain’t right. We are carelessly degrading ourselves, our planet, the value of life and the spirit of our humanity. And idolising those Simpleton Saints – the “Elon Musks of this world” – who gain efficiency and prominence by such hubristic “disembedding”, as the great Karl Polanyi called it – is adding insult to injury.
Thinking might have mostly ended in our anxious post-modern “corporate society” (Henry Mintzberg), but that does not mean that as leaders we should fall in line with the chorus. Our ancestors have battled for generations to create “free men” – and, frankly, that was never just about freedom of choice, but about freedom to be our very best. About our sublime freedom to become truly human.
#leadership #transformation #wef #gpdf #goodorganisations #hr #personaldevelopment #agile #responsibility #grli #business #teal #management
PS: Many thanks to Dave Ulrich for his (LinkedIn) comments on these thoughts, and especially for the great quote in the title, based on Gordon Hewitt!
Below some of the stimulating comments and challenges from our LinkedIn conversation:
- Outside-in and Inside-Out (Dave)
Dr Gordon Hewitt CBE, FRSE taught me that if you are on the road to hell, don’t go faster (in your terms, agility without responsibility is not “leadership for good”).
Creating “responsible” organizations (or leaders) is both science (we do have data on what works and what does not) and art (our data still only explains a portion of the desired outcomes).
I like to ask the question, “what is the most important thing a business or HR leader can give an employee” and offer answers
1. be safe
2. believe
3. become
4. belong
5. all the above
6. none of the above
nearly everyone answers #5 and I disagree. #6 … if an organization does not succeed in the marketplace, there is no workplace.
“Responsibly” (your term) connecting what happens inside to value created outside becomes a basis for long term success.
Response
I wonder whether being safe and belonging, believing and becoming, might not be more interdependent than they appear. Maslow’s late realisation apparently was that there is no pyramid of needs — and any “hierarchy” was of course in his (humanistic) head. What are we without faith, what without friendship, what without a feeling of becoming? Safety seems to be merely an access to the adventures of life. As Amartya Sen suggested “development is freedom” — and that requires us to be both pulled “out of ourselves”, and held by others, on that perilous road towards personhood…
Says the great poet Erich Kaestner: “Wird’s besser, wird’s schlimmer? Seien wir ehrlich. Das Leben ist immer… lebensgefaehrlich.” ;-)
Dave
Agree on interdependence, but would add the simple query, “so that ….” Create employee experience (be safe, believe, become, belong), so that a company succeeds in the marketplace.
Response
Dave and — apologies for dwelling too long in this delightful dialectic — here, as usual, I will invert: agree on company succeeds in the market place… SO THAT employees flourish and become their best, being safe, believing, becoming, belonging….
Comes to mind John Quincy Adams : “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
2. Suffering now, Celebrating later? (Phil)
Do you ever think that maybe all is exactly as it should be? In other words this is the age of capitalism and we need to go through this to learn whatever it is we need to learn to get to the next stage. The renaissance would not have happened without us first having gone through the middle ages and so forth. And you, me, and all the rest, posting our thinking on social media are no different from some poor monks screaming from the top of the monastery in the early 700s about how everyone should wake up and that we are living in a dystopia. The evolution of civilization is happening, its just a lot slower than we hoped for. From what I can tell most organised systems humans have created since the beginning of history stops people from seriously reflecting about what they do at work.. perhaps this is a necessary feature for optimal performance of organised systems in the current age as well.
Response
Phil, dear friend, you are becoming a marxist in your old days! :-) Personally, I am neither a believer in historical determinism, nor religious eschatology — and I do not share Hegel’s enthusiastic reading of the “spiritual” history of humankind. I do believe we as humans must never fail to strive — in any age or circumstance — to become our best and bring out the best for all. I fear an evaluative interpretation of our past from the “vantage point of now” is dangerous — we have lost “touch” with the affordances and models of thought of our ancestors. What matters to me is the affordances of today and here I will claim with Nietzsche that society is OURS to make. We must raise up and stand up to the judgment of our own times. We must take adult accountability for the kind of people we are, and carry the flame of humanity responsibly into the future. You rightly point out, as does Mats Alvesson, that a degree of functional stupidity is necessary to safeguard efficiency and progress — but only once we are roughly running into the right direction. And, here, I am with Dave (further down in the comments): If you are on the road to hell, don’t go faster!
