I’ve worked in businesses where financial woes were caused by external factors, like the global financial crisis. And I’ve worked in businesses where the woes were caused by internal factors.
External factors are difficult enough to deal with. But at least if your problems are caused from outside, and your business is well run, you have a fighting chance of coping with them.
If you really want to bring an organisation to its knees, you can’t beat internal factors. And recently I’ve had cause to reflect on one of the worst kinds of internal factors: the organisational idiot.
The shortcomings of the organisational idiot are often masked during good financial times – masked, but not completely hidden. When times are buoyant, we all still know who the idiots are. It’s just that their behaviour has a less detrimental impact on the organisation.
To a certain extent, it’s our own fault. We knew who he was, but no one did anything about him.
Incidentally, the word “idiot” comes to us from the ancient Greek idios, meaning “private”, or “own”. From there it evolved to idiotes, to include the idea of a lazy person, thence through the Latin and Old French idiota, or “ignorant person”, which is closer to the sense in which we use it today. It seems that the Greeks and French had some experience of other people buggering things up for the rest of them, too.
The organisational idiot is someone who proposes a seemingly simple solution to a complex problem, but ends up causing more trouble than the original problem when the solution goes unexpectedly, stunningly haywire.
Often the simple solution is perceived as genius. You might even think to yourself: “Wow, his powers of insight are brilliant! I could never have come up with such an elegant idea!” Do not be misled – they almost always lack the crucial insight that could prevent problems later.
Let me illustrate my point with the story of the guy whose headlights on his pick-up truck (for this was in the US) failed one night. He replaced a blown fuse with a bullet, which happened to fit perfectly into the fuse holder. Simple solution.
But after a few minutes the bullet overheated and discharged, neatly (one might say surgically) removing his right testicle. (It’s really not important which one it was, I suppose, but the story seems richer for the detail.)
In this story, the primary idiot – the alpha idiot, if you will – is the pick-up’s driver. But alpha idiots rarely fly solo; in my experience, to operate efficiently, they need an enabler, and often more than one.
When the bullet went off, the pick-up swerved off the road and hit a tree. His passenger said later: “Thank God we weren’t on that bridge when Thurston shot his nuts off, or we might have been dead.”
The passenger in the pick-up is our alpha idiot’s enabler: he could have, but didn’t, identify a potential flaw in the plan, and he could have, but didn’t, stop the alpha idiot from emasculating himself – literally in the story above, but metaphorically in a corporate sense.
And the enabler also misses the point of the experience. After his mate shoots his nuts off, the enabler can only focus on not having driven off a bridge – and is therefore incapable of learning anything truly useful from the experience.
As another aside, the pair in the pick-up had been out doing something known as “frog gigging”, which apparently involves impaling frogs with a pitch-fork. When the driver’s wife heard about the accident, she asked only: “How many frogs did the boys catch and did anyone get them [the frogs, I presume] from the truck?” – which shows that a network of idiot enablers can be wide indeed.
We’re all potential idiot enablers, when we don’t stand up against patently dumb ideas, or when we fail to point out misgivings or ask enough questions about a particular plan or course of action. You might be accused of being an obstruction to progress or a great idea, and it can be difficult to speak up.
I was once accused, in the middle of a staff meeting, of being against a particular plan because I obviously didn’t understand it. I replied that I was against the plan precisely because I did understand it.
It sometimes seems that we’re surrounded by organisational idiots and their many and varied enablers. The forces working against us may seem overwhelming.
If you’re not vigilant and you’re not prepared to stand up and challenge or question a plan or a solution, then there could be someone in your business right now replacing that blown fuse with a bullet.
You should hope that when it goes off it’s only they who suffer the consequences – and that you’re not crossing a bridge at the time.
