Forrest Gump was onto something
When retired Fort McMurray fire chief Darby Allen spoke last Saturday night at the annual Bob Ewert Memorial Dinner and Lecture in Prince George, he told two stories about functional stupidity.
His first anecdote was about the mandatory evacuation of the entire city of nearly 90,000 people. Sending everyone south was obviously the best plan.
South led to sanctuary communities that could help and was the opposite direction the fire was moving. The only thing north were the oil camps and the uncontrolled blaze was moving in that direction.
A member of his staff stopped Allen and told him he was wrong.
Sending everyone south would take too far too long, the employee argued, presenting Allen with the number of people involved, the number of vehicles and how long it would take them to all leave the city on one road. People would either die trapped in the traffic jam on Highway 63 South or inside the burning city.
The staff member suggested sending 30,000 people — the residents who lived north and west of the Athabasca River — in the opposite direction. There was nothing there except for lakes and forests, some lodges, the tiny community of Fort McKay and the massive oil sands camps.
It seemed crazy and dangerous but the suggestion forced Allen to slow down and reevaluate the evacuation plan. Despite the risks, the plan made sense if the primary goal was to save lives by emptying the city as fast as possible.
Ten minutes later, they revised the plan, as the employee recommended.
Allen had been on the path to making a stupid and potentially tragic mistake. His staff member stopped him.
Allen later issued a direct order — the only one he gave during the crisis, he told the Ewert audience — for his men to abandon several neighbourhoods and retreat to safer ground, where they could rest, regroup and focus their efforts on areas more likely to be spared the fire’s wrath.
They would have died out there, fighting the fire, if he had let them stay, he said. Put another way, he alerted those firefighters to their functional stupidity, telling them those homes were not worth dying for.
Functional stupidity can be of great value but can also cause devastating harm in workplaces, a concept Andr Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book, “The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work.”
In their influential 2012 article in the Journal of Management Studies, A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations, that led to the book, Spicer and Alvesson explained how stupidity(bad) can be functional (good).
“By cultivating functional stupidity, organizations are able to avoid the costs associated with broader critical thinking,” they wrote.
“By refraining from asking difficult and probing questions, they are able to create a sense of purposefulness and certainty around the organizations’ activities, despite the questionable basic of many of them.”
Although he didn’t use the phrase functional stupidity in his speech, Allen’s riveting stories made it clear that the antidote to stupidity — functional or not, in the workplace or in our personal lives — is courage.
Speaking up, even with ideas that seem stupid on the surface, takes courage. Stepping forward to resolve a situation, without waiting for direction, also requires courage. Stopping to listen to an opposing view and reconsider what seems like an obivous choice takes courage. So does leading people in a direction they might not want to go and then taking responsibility for that decision, regardless of its outcome.
Stupid is as stupid does, said Forrest Gump, a classic example of someone who knows that there are times when it’s smart to be stupid and it’s always the right time to do the right thing.
Being smart is great, but when supposedly-intelligent people won’t listen to contrary views, refuse to accept they aren’t the brightest person in the room and see changing their mind in light of new information as a sign of weakness, that will always be stupid.
Neil Godbout is managing editor of The Prince George Citizen.