Why do smart people do stupid things? It’s simple | Andre Spicer

Thinking is hard work and asking tough questions can make you unpopular. So it's no wonder that even clever people don't always use their brains

We all know smart people who do stupid things. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.

For more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldn't be out of place in a pre-school class; executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis; senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises; headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students; engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems; and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb.