We collect all the information we can find to proveourselves right and ignore any information that proves us wrong. We desperately cling to this illusion even when there is devastating evidence to the contrary. Not everyone can be above average вЂ“ but we can all have the illusion that we are. Even when you ask people who are objectively among the worst in a certain skill, they tend to say they are above average. If you ask a class of students whether they are above the class average in intelligence, the vast majority of hands shoot up.

Most people think they are above average drivers. One of the most powerful is self-serving bias: we tend to think we are better than others. Most intelligent people make mental short cuts all the time. Then we wonder why the вЂњbest and brightestвЂќ are uncreative and practically useless. For the first 20 years of life, people are rewarded for their analytical intelligence. Practical intelligence is our ability to get things done. Creative intelligence is our ability to deal with novel situations. Most standard IQ tests miss out two other aspects of human intelligence: creative and practical intelligence. IQ tests only capture analytical intelligence this is the ability to notice patterns and solve analytical problems. Having a high IQ score does not mean that someone is intelligent. After looking back at my own experiences and reading the rapidly growing body of work on why humans fail to think, my co-author and I started to come to some conclusions. IвЂ™m the kind of person who frequently ends up paying the вЂњidiot taxesвЂќ levied on us by companies and governments for not thinking ahead.Д¬learly I had a personal interest in trying to work out why I, and millions of others like me, could be so stupid so much of the time. I spent large chunks of my days sitting in meetings which everyone present knew were entirely pointless. I would set exams to test students on knowledge I knew they would forget as soon as they walked out of the examination room. At work I would spend years writing a scientific paper that only a dozen people would read. While doing this research I realised that my own life was also blighted with stupidities. No wonder so many of these intelligent people described their jobs as being dumb. We found mature adults enthusiastically participating in leadership development workshops that wouldnвЂ™t be out of place in a pre-school class executives who paid more attention to overhead slides than to careful analysis senior officers in the armed forces who preferred to run rebranding exercises than military exercises headteachers who were more interested in creating strategies than educating students engineers who focused more on telling good news stories than solving problems and healthcare workers who spent more time ticking boxes than caring for patients.

We were constantly surprised by the ways that these intelligent people ended up doing the most unintelligent things. We all have friends who have impressive IQs but lack basic common sense.ДЇor more than a decade, Mats Alvesson and I have been studying smart organisations employing smarter people. At home we might live with someone who is intellectually gifted but also has no idea. At work we see people with brilliant minds make the most simple mistakes. W e all know smart people who do stupid things.

Dum people