(2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional

Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional. 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... 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. (mediocrity)

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.

Mats Alvesson is a Swedish management professor at Lund University — one of the most cited organisational researchers in Europe

In The Stupidity Paradox (2016, co-authored with Andre 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. (Most Successful Companies Get Just One Thing Right)

The cost of all this frictionless efficiency gets paid later — in bad decisions nobody questioned, in talent that quietly exits, and in organizations that can no longer think their way out of problems they created by not thinking in the first place.

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. (reflective thinker)

None of these labels are policies. None of them show up in your performance review (directly). But they accumulate. Meetings get scheduled without you... 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.

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. (theater)

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?”

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.

I want to name something here directly

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.

Neurodivergent thinkers often have a particular difficulty performing the confidence theater, 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.

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.

a form of cognitive integrity that the organisation is structurally punishing. (Conceptual Integrity)

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

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.

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... 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.

What grounded confidence actually looks like here

The instinct — and I understand it, I’ve felt it myself — is to learn the confidence theatre

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 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. (change your organization)

This is what I mean when I talk about grounded communication confidence Congruent

Back to that meeting
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.