Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Smart and caring people do stupid things. I do stupid things. I advocate going out and finding these stupid things. Knowing they exist helps to prevent and plan for them.

There is a lot of stupid out there in the world. Otherwise smart and caring people doing things that are just plain stupid. Here are a few examples (I may have blogged about some of these before):

Meetings with no other reason than the calendar – If it is the first Tuesday of the month, we have a meeting. We don’t have anything to discuss, we don’t have any decisions pending, but it is the first Tuesday of the month, so we stop working and have a meeting.

Deciding budgets without reason – Some people cut items out of a budget without any context. They will remove all funds for flour in an apple pie budget not knowing that flour is a necessary ingredient.

Keeping people ignorant so you can hurt – In an organization, one section of people is supposed to do their part. They don’t know how to do it, so another section does their job for them. The section doing all the work is, well, doing all the work and suffering from fatigue and anguish. The managers refuse to have the responsible section of people learn to do their jobs because they want to be able to blame that section for all the fatigue and anguish in the organization.

I could go on…

What I advocate is that we go out and see what stupid things people are doing. There are a couple of reasons.

First, until I realized some of the stupid things mentioned above, I never planned to avoid them. How in the world could smart and caring people ever do some of these things? They do. When I realized that people did these things, I was better able to prevent them.

Second, when I see the stupid things that other smart and caring people do, I am better able to see the stupid things that I do. Yes, I do stupid things as well. Finding stupid helps me to see my own stupid.