Why Smart Teams Make Dumb Decisions
“Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity.”
That zinger from Dr. Karl Albrecht recently stopped me in my tracks.
Not because it was shocking—but because it felt... familiar.
Albrecht calls it the organizational smart gap—the space between the brainpower you have and the brainpower you actually use. And once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
Especially in internal communication.
I’ve lost count of how many smart, strategic communicators I’ve seen hired for their insight...only to be sidelined into sending all-staff emails and formatting slide decks. Treated as tacticians instead of the strategic thought partners they are.
One past employer springs to mind—leadership made decisions in an echo chamber, ignored input from their own teams, and quietly trained employees to keep ideas to themselves. It wasn’t just a communication issue. It was institutional self-sabotage.
So what can organizations do to close the smart gap?
Albrecht recommends two things:
Make better use of the brainpower already in the room
Grow your own “smart people” by creating the right conditions for ideas, resources, and leadership to thrive together
Sound simple? It’s not. But it is possible.
In fact, I recently spoke about this at the PRSA Employee Communications Connect25 Conference—where I led a session on how internal comms teams can introduce themselves strategically through road shows. (Yes, road shows. The not-boring kind.)
Couldn’t join me in person? You can catch the on-demand version of my session here.
Whether you're in internal comms or not—think about where the smart gap shows up in your organization. And more importantly, how you can help close it.
Because no team should settle for collective stupidity.
