Picture a meeting you’ve been in — probably more than once.
The agenda is ambitious, the stakes are real, and you’ve done your homework. You’ve actually thought about the problem. You have questions that nobody else seems to be asking, and you have a perspective that, as far as you can tell, is both accurate and useful.
And somehow, again, the meeting moves around you. The person who delivered three confident-sounding sentences about “alignment” and “moving the needle” gets the nod. Your point — the careful one, the one with the nuance and the caveats and the actual evidence — gets a polite “that’s interesting” before the conversation cheerfully rolls on without it.
You leave the room wondering, not for the first time, whether you’re the problem.
Here’s what I want to suggest: you might not be.
Enter Mats Alvesson, and a phrase you will not be able to un-hear
Mats Alvesson is a Swedish management professor at Lund University — one of the most cited organisational researchers in Europe, and someone who has spent decades doing what many management academics carefully avoid: telling the truth about how organisations actually work, rather than how the business press insists they do.
In The Stupidity Paradox (2016, co-authored with André Spicer), Alvesson introduced the concept of ‘functional stupidity’ — and once you know the term, you’ll probably start seeing it (almost) everywhere.
Functional stupidity doesn’t mean that people in organisations are individually dim. It means something stranger and more structural: that organisations actively cultivate an environment where deep thinking, critical questioning, and genuine reflection are quietly discouraged. Not banned. Not punished (directly). Just... not particularly welcome.
And, paradoxically, it works. At least in the short term. When everyone stops asking “but why, though?” and just executes, things move faster. Decisions get made. Harmony is maintained. Quarterly targets are hit. The machine runs smoothly, right up until it doesn’t.
The cost of all this frictionless efficiency gets paid later — in bad decisions nobody questioned, in talent that quietly exits, and in organisations that can no longer think their way out of problems they created by not thinking in the first place.
The quiet machinery of functional stupidity
Functional stupidity doesn’t announce itself. There’s no memo that says “please stop using your brain at full capacity, it’s making people uncomfortable”.
Instead, it operates through what Alvesson calls ‘reflexivity taxes’ — small but consistent social costs levied on anyone who does too much thinking out loud. Ask too many “why” questions and you’re slowing things down. Flag a risk that everyone else is comfortable ignoring and you’re being negative. Point out that the strategy doesn’t quite add up and you’re “not a team player”. Sit with complexity longer than the room has patience for and you’re indecisive.
None of these labels are policies. None of them show up in your performance review (directly). But they accumulate. Meetings get scheduled without you. Your ideas get “parked” for consideration later (a organisational euphemism that means never). You stop being seen as a safe pair of hands and start being filed, somewhere in the unspoken consciousness of the culture, as “difficult”.
The social penalty for thinking carefully, in a functionally stupid organisation, is real and cumulative. And it operates below the level at which you can easily name it and fight it.
The visibility problem hiding inside all of this
Here’s where it gets personal.
Functionally stupid environments don’t just suppress thinking. They also scramble the signals that indicate competence. When critical reflection is taxed out of the system, what rises to replace it is the performance of certainty — fluent, confident delivery of ideas that don’t require too much from the audience.
This is the confidence theatre that many of us have watched, baffled, from the wings.
The colleague who doesn’t know what they don’t know moves through the room with ease. They’re decisive. They’re clear. They use the right language with the right affect at the right moment. They never make anyone uncomfortable by saying “I’m not sure” or “that assumption might not hold” or “has anyone actually tested this?”
And so they’re visible. They register as leadership material. They get opportunities.
Meanwhile, the person who has thought harder about the actual problem — who has the depth, the nuance, the carefully earned uncertainty about the parts of the picture that are genuinely uncertain — reads, through the organisation’s distorted lens, as hesitant. Unclear. Perhaps not quite ready.
They feel invisible. And they can’t quite figure out why, because from the inside, they’re doing everything right.
They are doing everything right. And that’s the whole problem.
A particular word about neurodivergent professionals
I want to name something here directly, because it runs through a lot of what I write and a lot of what I hear from readers.
For neurodivergent professionals — those of us with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or any of the other cognitive profiles that mean our brains process the world somewhat differently — functionally stupid environments are not just uncomfortable. They can be genuinely destabilising.
Here’s why. Neurodivergent thinkers often have a particular difficulty performing the confidence theatre, not because they lack confidence in their ideas, but because they can’t easily stop noticing what’s wrong with the script. The pattern recognition is too sharp. The inconsistency is too obvious. The gap between what’s being said in the meeting and what’s actually true about the situation is too glaring to politely ignore.
This is often framed as a social deficit — an inability to read the room, to fit in, to modulate communication appropriately. But I’d like to propose a reframe: what if the room is the problem?
What functionally stupid environments interpret as a neurodivergent professional’s inability to conform is often, in fact, their inability to perform stupidity on demand. The very trait that makes them “difficult” in certain cultures — the compulsive noticing, the honest assessment, the genuine inability to just nod along — is a form of cognitive integrity that the organisation is structurally punishing.
The invisibility experienced by neurodivergent professionals in these environments isn’t a communication failure. It’s a category error. The organisation is looking for one thing, and they’re offering something better, in a format the organisation doesn’t currently know how to receive.
Three things that are actually true
I want to be precise here, because there are a few easy conclusions you might draw from all of this that I think would be mistakes.
First: this is not an excuse to stop working on communication. Knowing that functional stupidity is real doesn’t mean that clarity doesn’t matter, or that strategic communication is just conformity. It means that communication needs to be built on a foundation of self-knowledge rather than performance. That’s a different project — and a harder one.
Second: not every organisation is equally functionally stupid. The mechanisms Alvesson describes exist on a spectrum. Some cultures are far more reflexive, far more genuinely curious about honest thinking, than others. Part of career wisdom is developing the ability to read the difference. And part of what this newsletter is about is helping you build that read — so you can make informed choices about which rooms are worth showing up in.
Third: naming what’s happening matters, even when you can’t immediately change it. There is something genuinely useful in having a conceptual frame for an experience that has probably felt, until now, like a personal failing. Functional stupidity isn’t a metaphor. It’s a documented organisational phenomenon with a rigorous academic literature behind it. The feeling of invisibility you carry out of certain rooms is not evidence that you communicated poorly. It may be evidence that you thought too well.
What grounded confidence actually looks like here
The instinct — and I understand it, I’ve felt it myself — is to learn the confidence theatre. To practise the assertive delivery. To smooth off the edges, simplify the message, perform the certainty you don’t quite feel.
Sometimes that’s a reasonable tactical adaptation. Code-switching is real and sometimes it’s just survival.
But the deeper project, I think, is different. It’s not to perform your way into visibility in environments that are hostile to thinking. It’s to develop enough self-knowledge that you can:
Recognise when an environment is structurally punishing something that is actually a strength.
Find the pockets within organisations — and they almost always exist — where genuine reflection is valued.
Know when the problem is your communication, and when the problem is the room.
Make deliberate choices about where you invest your thinking, rather than persistently trying to be legible to cultures that have decided not to look.
This is what I mean when I talk about grounded communication confidence. Not louder. Not smoother. Not more like the person who talked about “moving the needle” for three sentences and got a promotion.
More ‘you’. Strategically, clearly, with your eyes open about the environment you’re in.
Back to that meeting
The person in the meeting who didn’t get heard. They weren’t invisible because they were unclear. They were invisible because clarity — real clarity, the kind that names what’s actually complicated and why — was inconvenient.
That’s a different diagnosis. And a different solution.
Alvesson’s argument is ultimately not pessimistic — or at least, it doesn’t have to be. Naming the pathology is the beginning of being able to navigate it. Understanding why smart organisations encourage stupidity, and how that stupidity creates the specific invisibility that so many competent people experience, is the first step toward refusing to take the blame for a structural problem.
You are (most likely) not the problem.
The script is.
And some of us were never very good at reading from scripts we knew were wrong.
Good.
Next in the series: If functional stupidity explains why organisations suppress thinking, Chris Argyris spent forty years documenting the machinery they use to do it. His concept of organisational defensive routines — and the distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning — adds another piece to the puzzle. Or, put more bluntly: why the boulder keeps rolling back down the hill, and what it costs the people who keep asking why.
Coming next week.
If you found this useful, forward it to the competent person in your life who keeps asking inconvenient questions in meetings. They need to know there’s a name for what’s happening to them.
And if you want to dig deeper into Alvesson’s thinking, start with The Stupidity Paradox (2016) — it’s the most accessible entry point into his work, and one of those rare management books that is both rigorous and genuinely funny.
Hey there,
If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.
I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.
I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:
• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.
• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.
• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.
My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.
Rooting for you,
Sven
Huh. I may actually need therapy for workplace trauma because reading this gave me a panic attack.
Thank you so much for this – I have seen this in action, far too often. I would even go as far to say that this seems to be the default setting in big corporations, many government departments and the culture as a whole now. Honesty and authenticity – the real, not the performative – is the exception.
I would, however, take issue with the references to 'neurodivergent thinkers'. As a therapist who has worked with a lot of children and young people, I have reached the conclusion that we are all, in fact, 'neurodiverse' – the term is meaningless, was invented only a few decades ago, and was never intended to be used diagnostically. This should come as no surprise, as we are all unique individuals and the ways in which we think should be expected to be different.
My theory is that those who might currently be placed under the neurodivergent umbrella are the people who have in fact retained the ability to see clearly, speak honestly and have the courage to do so – they still behave like humans, in an increasingly inhuman environment. Everything is currently pitched against people like that, so it is no surprise that these individuals are 'othered', 'diagnosed' and very often medicated. The 'functionally stupid' system can't afford to acknowledge the truth.