Why Bird-Brains Get the Highest Perches

Everyone wants to believe that the administrators and executives perched at the top of our institutions and organizations hold their jobs because of their exceptional competence. After all, that’s the way things are supposed to work in a meritocracy, right? Sure, and so it must be only our bosses who are bird-brains. It couldn’t possibly be everyone else’s too. Or could it? Well, it probably is, and the fact that our higher-ups never seem to act with any more insight than we would expect of our pets isn’t as controversial as you might suspect. In fact, we’ve spent centuries trying to explain why our bosses seem better suited for pecking at seeds than making policy.

The 19th century gave us the Ivory Tower theory, which supposes that our big-wigs aren’t incompetent as much as they’re just cut-off. Their positions prevent them from seeing what’s really going on, and so they’re doomed to create irrelevant policy. But this doesn’t explain why executives frequently dump their stock in a company long before outsiders know that something’s gone badly wrong, or why administrators always seem to have a crisis-management strategy set up long before a scandal emerges. They’re obviously not so cut-off that they can’t see an impending disaster, are they? So, the 20th century moved on to the Peter Principle and its funnier cousin, the Dilbert Principle, to explain executive incompetence. In these theories, meritocracy itself creates clueless big-wigs. People are either promoted until they’re too lousy at their jobs to warrant further promotion, and just stay there messing up things, or they just get promoted out of harm’s way, because they’re too incompetent to be trusted with the more practical jobs. But neither of these theories explain why organizations will install people exactly like the person they just fired, or usually, just pushed into “early retirement,” when they go outside the organization for “new blood.” Institutions, it seems, actually seek out clueless people for their highest positions.

Now, why would they do that? Well, first, the nature of competence itself produces some surprising effects. While there are a few people, usually called prodigies, who are exceptionally good at something without knowing how or why they are, most people need to understand the point of an activity before they can become competent at it. Then, there are those who understand, but cannot do very well, and those who both understand and can do well. Both of these groups have the capacity to judge competence, both in themselves and in others, because they understand what an activity is about. But, oddly enough, the largest group of people are those who so completely misunderstand the point of something that they’re not only incompetent, they’re also completely unable to judge competence, and so they’re actually incapable of knowing that they’re awful at a task.

The two sociologists, named Dunning and Kruger, who attempted to measure the extent of this problem in society, panicked at the results of their surveys. Among the more disturbing implications of the existence and extent of this phenomenon is the fact that those who “get it” and those who don't “get it” will never be able to understand, or even communicate in a meaningful way, with each other. Worse still, since there’s no way for someone this incompetent at something to realize it, there’s also no way for anyone, including you, to know when you are so wrong you’re not even wrong.

For instance, it’s entirely possible that those executives at the celebrated energy trading company that created blackouts throughout the West Coast in order to justify absurd rate hikes, and then invested the proceeds in bizarre investment schemes that lost so much money that they had to hide their financial condition with “creative accounting” were actually as smart as they, and everyone else in the business community, claimed. Or, it’s also possible they were just plain clueless, as the more charitable of the rest of us think. We can never really know for sure, but I think that not only were they clueless, but that their cluelessness was exactly what made them eligible to hold their positions in the first place, because complete incompetence turns out to be a very useful trait for those who administer broken institutions.

You see, institutions are designed to serve a function or fix a problem in society, but they’re also designed to perpetuate themselves. Of course, things change, and so, eventually, every institution will become obsolete, but no institution will ever dissolve itself or change itself beyond recognition. And here is the problem. If a broken organization gives someone competent the authority to make changes, then this person would feel obligated to reshape the organization into something it isn’t. This means that the organization would, essentially, cease to exist. This, of course, is unacceptable, so, instead, organizations will rely on people who are so wrong that they can’t even realize they’re wrong to ensure the organization’s own survival. In other words, if you’re smart enough to question an institution, then you’re too smart for that institution to give you the authority to change it.

Competence is a threat, not an asset, to any entrenched institution. And this is why we keep seeing absurd policies being promulgated and why we keep seeing things like, for instance, the most powerful economist in the world having to admit to a congressional committee that he didn’t see our latest economic collapse coming because it never even occurred to him that something might be wrong with market theory. As Upton Sinclair pointed out, long ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”