Mindfulness, stupidity

paradox, & decisions

Jesper Doepping
MUIC
Functional stupidity!

• Telltale aspects of functional stupidity:

• Not thinking about your assumptions (no reflexivity)
• Not asking why you are doing something (no justification)
• Not considering the consequences or wider meaning of your actions (substantive
reasoning)

• Classical aspects:
• We tend to go out of our way to ignore information when the results might be
disturbing or not in our best interests.
• Dunning-Kruger effect. People with poor skills systematically and unreasonable
overestimate their abilities
• Abbot (study of professionals) and McGoey (Strategic ignorance)
Forms of functional stupidity:
Persuasion over substance.

• Closing down cognition. Mistaken modes of thought and

intellectual frameworks for reality, do not challenge them.
• Motivational defects. Lack of curiosity, I am a professional etc
• Lack of emotional reasoning – not taking your emotional valuations
seriously
• Moral base. Your morals limits your ability to think

• “We have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an

almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence,
heartiness, gaiety – in order to enjoy life” Nietzsche
The stupidity paradox – functional stupidity a
double edged sword

• It helps individuals to manage their own doubts, be happy, feel

comfortable with ambiguity, positive and upbeat, be productive.
• Individuals can feel malaise, disappointment, values and actual work
are to distant, disengaged.

• Liberal doses of functional stupidity can help organizations to eliminate

difficult questions, create harmony, make people more efficient.
• For organizations the issue is they start overlooking problems, create
large disasters, suboptimal structures and practices develop.
2 kinds of organizational functional stupidity

• Leadership-induced stupidity
• Structure-induced stupidity
1. You never go around your boss.
2. You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that
he wants dissenting views.
3. If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it.
4. You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he
wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss.
5. Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported,
but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires, and you keep
your mouth shut.
3 other kinds of organizational functional
stupidity

• Imitation-induced stupidity – follow the crowd

• Branding-induced stupidity
• Culture/identity induced stupidity
Stupidity management – How to!

• Stupidity management involves interventions that reduce or

narrow thinking at work. The stupidity manager tries to make sure
that people don’t transgress the mindset prescribed by the
organization and industry.
• These assumptins are to be taken for granted (Visions, strategy, change,
structures, HR procedures)
• People should focus on the means not the ends
1. Use Authority
2. Use Seduction
3. Use naturalization (tradition)
4. Use opportunism – appeal to peoples self-interest
Anti-stupidity management

• The virtue of negative capability = the ability to face up to

‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, paradoxes and ambiguities”

• Think critically.
• Observe – be the anthropologist and avoid “solutionism”
• Interpret – what does the natives think here (the doctor)
• Question – what is the 10 most stupid things we do around here.
Mindfulness and high reliability organizations
The mirror image of functional stupidity?!
• HROs is grounded less in routines and structures and more often in
processes related to organizational mindfulness—the human capacity to
detect and correct errors and to adapt to unexpected events before
small factors develop into catastrophic failures.

• Key characteristics:
• Preoccupation with failure – small failures must be noticed;
• Reluctance to simplify–“distinctiveness retained rather than lost in a category”;
• Sensitivity to operations – “notice nuances that portend failure”;
• Commitment to resilience – ability to bounce back by “locating pathways to
recovery”;
• Deference to expertise – empowerment of individuals “to implement those
pathways.
• Comfort with uncertainty and chaos
 Mindfulness in action
• Mindfulness in action occurs when HROs achieve an attentive yet flexible
focus capable of incorporating multiple—sometimes competing—realities to
assess alternative solutions and take action in dynamic situations.
Postive attitude
Towards failing

Ability to compartmentalize Comfort with uncertainty

And chaos
Mindfulness
• Creates relevant and precise focus points for the situation at hand
• There is a key focus on finding solutions and a pre-occupation with
failing.
• Inside the frame “failure is not an option, when one way fail,
move on and create new solutions”.

• Mindfulness is central in relation to what exactly we are doing –

that means it both demands and exclude:
• Reflexivity, judgement, substantial reasoning.

Functional stupidity and mindfulness occur together!

Decisions as promises!
• People do try to:
• Formulate problems.
• Find alternatives
• To calculate and judge
• This describes a process, but
does not ensure substantial
rationality!
• Procedurally rational decisions will have
indeterminable effects, and substantively
rational decision will have indeterminable
processes. In the first case, the criterion of
rationality is how the decision is reached; in
the second case, the criterion is the
consequences of a decision effectuated by
the series of events that it sets in motion.
• Process discuss what leads up to a decision,
substantive decisions what are the
consequences of a decision. Past and future!
The focus points is changed from what was
before, to what comes after.

• Decisions move things and set processes in motion that that will
lead to intended, unintended and surprising effects in the future.
• The future is an accomplishment that we can influence.
• A decision produce a situation for new decisions. A decision is a a
promise to engage with a world that is not yet seen!
• The promise have to become an act of will. You become the link
between the present and the future.
• And this process requires both memories and forgetfulness
Responsibility and accountability

• ‘Lies not in keeping one’s word in the face of radically changed

circumstances, but rather in a willingness to risk oneself … by
reinterpreting the promise to new ends, divorcing it from its
original intention in gesture of fidelity to an unknown future’ We
need to constantly renegotiate the decision with the reality that
evolves.
An act is not an achievement

• People can act but the their achievements depend on how others
act. That means simple causality is at best doubtful

• Decisions are processes of alternative generation. It is a discussion

of “what could be the case”. Selection depends on ambitions
about organizational futures, justified by emotions, motivations,
and judgements

• The eventual decision is a promise, which opens up new decisions

Stupidity, mindfulness, and decisions

• What this emplies is that all decisions are taken under

assumptions, justifications and reasoning about a world in the
future.
• We can be held accountable and responsible. But if the original
assumptions, justifications, and reasoning are not mindfully
attended to – it will move further and further away from the real
world and capture the decision maker in doing wrong, because we
never forgot and never forgive the person.
• Only by being reflexive, challenge the justifications, and reasoning
can we move out of the functional stupidity.