Structural stupidity in strategy

4 fast-tracks to strategic failure

Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, professor, and social critic, recently described "structural stupidity."

As he put it, “you have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent, but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely. And what happens? They go silent. And when—when the moderates, or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution, gets stupid.”

Strategy-making is both institutional and social. It takes big organizations to do big things. And it takes many people working in synch to make those big organizations go.

So there’s an intersection between Haidt’s observation and strategy-making. There are at least four related structurally-stupid pitfalls in organizational culture that lead to poor straetgy-making. I've lived and worked in all four at varying times and so I’ve seen each in person. Chances are you have too.

The man with the plan. The single point of failure model. Today this is on display through Vladimir Putin's distinctly distant leadership style. Strategic decision is made by one person and one person alone. No consultation. No discussion. There is no hierarchy, there is no ladder, there's just one person at the top. That's it. The upside is speed and unity in moving out on orders, but the more-massive-downside is the likelihood for error and miscalculation is exponentially greater. Simply put, you cannot alone do big and great things. You cannot alone orchestrate a large changes in human affairs.

Senior dominates subordinates. A corollary to the above, this is the single ladder of failure. In this case, the chain of command controls everything. Now subordinates seek to please two individuals simultaneously. First, the "Boss" at the tip top. And then, every subordinate must also completely satisfy their direct senior. In practice, every rung on the ladder has a veto over any decision, which means that novel ideas must survive 4, 5, or 6 knockout rounds if they ever want to rise in an organization. So many checks does limit errors. But the cost comes in strangling new ideas.

Missing the fool. Russian literature loves the trope of the fool as truth-teller. While nowadays the term "fool" carries loads of negativity, the role is still imoprtant. To have someone around who says the hard things, who sanity-checks the item of the day. That's valuable. This is, by degree, different from the veto layers described above. Some scrutiny is appropriate. Too much is bad. Every organization must have this truth-teller. If not, ideas go unchecked, which means they move out into the world flabbly. Iron sharpens iron, but butter just globs up against butter.

Black Hole staffs. From which no new ideas originate. They view their role as simply to transfer and translate "The Boss's" random phrases into PowerPoints and memos. The problem is that of anyone in an organization, these are the people closest to the summit. They have a view similar to the leader's. And so many of these staffs simply cover their eyes, ears, and mouths, make themselves blind, deaf, and mute. They rob the organization of another set of minds that might expand the organization's viewpoint and ideas.