The 12th Tools4AgileTeams, the big conference about agility in all its facets, took place from November 30th to December 1st, 2023. Under the motto “Agile is a state of mind” approaches, examples, impulses and and and around teamwork, leadership, product management, service management, at scale (scaled agility) and modern work were exchanged, discussed and demonstrated for two days. Today we introduce you to the session “Future Work – freeing people’s intelligence from stupid organizations” from the track Modern Work, which caused lively discussions and “aha” moments on the first day of the conference.
When organizations encourage stupid behavior
The processes that have developed, the working environments created, and the prevailing incentive systems in a company influence us every day and also affect how we act and behave at work. It’s surprising, but the factors mentioned often lead to intelligent people exhibiting “stupid” behavior. And when this behavior spreads throughout the organization, we talk about “swarm stupidity.”
Swarm stupidity is the opposite of swarm intelligence. If a group of people works to solve a problem, but remains below their capabilities or blindly follows the actions of others without questioning them, this is group stupidity. It occurs more often when individuals are able to influence other people without convincing arguments or disregarding “common sense”.
How does swarm stupidity work?
Nonsensical things happen in countless organizations. There are plenty of examples of this: ongoing efficiency madness, regulated intelligence, chaos instead of agility, extensive self-preoccupation, permanent overload, failure to eliminate legacy issues, lack of differentiation between complexity and complexity, ignorance of systemic connections, prioritization of what is urgent over what is important, avoidance of customer proximity – the list could be continued indefinitely.
Why is that? We should actually know better, right? Nevertheless, we find crowd stupidity and the effects mentioned in a large number of companies.
Solutions in the fight against systematic stupidity
In a lecture at the previous Tools4AgileTeams Conference hat Robert Gies, who as an experienced practitioner, successful entrepreneur, renowned coach and sought-after speaker is one of the most prominent minds in the German-speaking Agile community, examines the phenomenon of “resistant nonsense”. In this session he puts forward hypotheses about possible solutions to overcome system-related stupid behavior.
Here is the video of his inspiring talk entitled “Future Work – freeing people’s intelligence from stupid organizations”:
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Further information
The path to an agile, learning, dynamically robust organization
Organization and Complexity: Solving Complex Problems
The myth of team autonomy: Why it is an illusion and we still need it
Modern organizational development: What comes after agile teams?