A situation that holds together only because every participant behaves stupidly; if one acted sensibly it would collapse.
Ebert's term, borrowed from Blish. Its diagnostic value is real: if an account of an institutional failure requires everyone involved to have been stupid, the account is probably wrong.
In practice
- An account of a regulatory failure that requires forty officials to have been simultaneously stupid is probably missing the incentive that made each step sensible.
- A story about a competitor's mistake that only works if their whole leadership was foolish should prompt a search for what they knew.
- Standing
- A useful test for whether an institutional failure narrative is plausible.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life