Why Thinking Stupid is a Smart Strategy

Ok, we know what you’re thinking: “It doesn’t sound like a smart strategy!” But stay with us and we’ll explain how thinking stupid can transform your leadership, your staff’s performance and even customer buy in.

Firstly, let’s define what we mean by Thinking Stupid.

The truth is, our survival brain still drives most of our decision-making—at least initially.

This ‘survival brain’ has very few functions beyond looking out for our self interest (in other words, keeping us alive, fed and sheltered), mitigating the risks we are exposed to, and just as importantly, it also biases our behavior towards the simplest and easiest solution. When survival is the name of the game, complexity and complication are not our friends.

Thinking Stupid is really about keeping things simple to understand and easy to follow. But critically, it also means we need to design our systems and processes in such a way that they make failure difficult.

But why does this last point matter so much? It matters because even our best employees have bad days – they get sick, they fight with their significant others, they have children that drive them to distraction and they have bills to pay. In other words, ordinary human life gets in the way. And as much as we all like to think that we provide our employees with a significant and motivating ‘Why,’ often times, that is insufficient to outweigh their own personal ‘Whys.’

What this means is, we need to design our systems in such a way that all of our employees can deliver the results we need them to, regardless of their levels of engagement (which are typically low across virtually all industries) as well as independent of how they might be feeling on a particular day.

We used to call Thinking Stupid “fool-proofing.” A practice we still engage in when situations are life and death. For instance, drive into any gas station anywhere around the world and the fire cut-off switch is usually a big red button that is hard to miss. The emergency procedure cards on aircraft are likewise childishly simple and easy to understand. The wiring in modern homes is now designed with circuit breakers that protect both our electrical equipment and our lives should there be a fault in the system. It seems when our life is at stake, we Think Stupid a lot.

But this is not always the case in our businesses systems and processes, many of which are characterized by friction and breakage points that require high levels of engagement simply to produce predictable results.

So how do we begin to think stupid?

1. Plan for failure

This doesn’t mean we need to be overly negative; it’s about building agility and adaptability into the system. Start by assessing what might go wrong and prepare an action plan in advance so that you ensure productivity and profitability regardless of circumstance.

2. Keep things simple and easy

Clarity is the grease that keeps the wheels of industry moving. Nothing slows an organization down more than second-guessing and the confusion born out of a lack of clear direction and decisiveness from leadership teams.

3. Make failure difficult

Once you’ve assessed where failure might occur, structure your systems so that this failure becomes more difficult. That means adding friction and barriers to systems to steer process flow in the direction you want it to go. There’s a reason many stores have escalators to help you get inside but only stairs to get out – they want you to stay inside!

If we consider behavior such as saving money for the future, Thinking Stupid truly becomes evident.

Ask most people if saving money is a good idea and overwhelmingly, people will agree with you. Probe further to see if they think it’s relevant to them and again, they’ll respond in the affirmative. However, what we know from statistics gathered by banks and other financial institutions is that people rarely save money consciously or manually. A far more effective strategy is to systematize savings using tools such as direct debits – money preemptively taken from your salary before you get a chance to miss it. Because you never see the money, it’s hard not to save it.

So it seems that Thinking Stupid no only makes you money, it helps you keep it too.

Article by Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan, Behavioral Researchers & Strategists

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