Glenford Smith | Why smart employees fail

QUESTION: I’ve come to realise that you can have a group of smart people and still make foolish and stupid decisions. Recently, some of my colleagues and I, including department heads, did a marketing plan. Everybody gave their input. We were confident in what we had done. In a sentence, we were an absolute calamity. It didn’t work. And it turned off and angered many of our valued clients and customers. What could we have done differently?

– T.

CAREERS: Thank you for your insight and your question. That is a profound realisation you’ve come to. Intelligent people sometimes make egregious errors in judgement all the while thinking they are right.

I don’t have the benefit of knowing the nature of the plan or the credentials of the people in question. What I know is that a large group of bright and educated people can be led astray just by virtue of how our minds work. The following is, therefore, put forward for your consideration.

It seems to me that since you all contributed to the plan, which when put to the test failed to get you the desired result, that would indicate that your thinking was faulty. You want to find the bug – to use a computer programming term – in your thinking. This is usually where I find that especially brilliant and academically accomplished people can go wrong.

Specifically, I would advise you to inform yourselves about ‘critical thinking’ and ‘confirmation bias’. An exceptional site where these and other critical terms are explained is The Skeptic’s Dictionary – www.skepdic.com. It provides many insights into the various strange beliefs, amusing deceptions, and dangerous delusions we all need to be aware of.

It says of critical thinking: “The goal of critical thinking is to arrive at the most reasonable beliefs and take the most reasonable actions. We have evolved, however, not to seek the truth, but to survive and reproduce. Critical thinking is an unnatural act. By nature, we’re driven to confirm and defend our current beliefs even to the point of irrationality. We are prone to reject evidence that conflicts with our beliefs and to attack those who offer such evidence.”

No matter how brilliant we are, we are prone to fall prey to this. So you and your group do not need to feel bad, rather, use the experience as a learning one.

The Skeptics Dictionary defines confirmation bias as “a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one’s beliefs”

Where you used data for the marketing plan, for example, you might tend to look at that which tended to fit with your expectations, if you are unaware of this.

I would advise you to spend some time at the site. Perhaps the details of how all of you could go wrong will reveal themselves to you.

In addition, I would recommend two books for your close study: A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking by Greg Haskins and Why Smart Executives Fail by Sydney Finkelstein.

 Glenford Smith is president of CareerBiz Coach and author of ‘From Problems to Power’ and ‘Profile of Excellence’. careerbizcoach@gmail.com