Act I — The King is naked
In Hans Christian Andersen's tale, an emperor parades before his people, convinced he is wearing an invisible suit. No one dares to contradict this illusion. Not the advisers. Not the courtiers. Nor the people. All prefer to stay silent rather than run the risk of being revealed as mediocre. Until a child simply says:
«The Emperor has no clothes.»
This tale is often presented as a fable about vanity. Yet it tells of something else. It describes a mechanism that can be found wherever human beings organise themselves to exercise responsibility.
At first glance, the problem seems to be that of a leader blinded by his pride. Yet, if this story continues to speak to us nearly two centuries later, it is because its true subject is not the king.
It is the silence that surrounds him.
The false weavers do not merely promise an extraordinary fabric. They add a decisive condition: only intelligent people and those worthy of their post are able to see it.
From this moment on, everyone stops looking at the garment.
Everyone is starting to look at themselves.
Say :
«I can’t see a thing.»
no longer simply contradicts the king.
This amounts to publicly acknowledging that one may be incapable, incompetent or unworthy of one's office.
Silence does not therefore result from an order.
It stems from a norm.
A norm so powerful that everyone ends up contributing to its maintenance themselves.
This mechanism does not belong in fairy tales.
In 2016, researchers Mats Alvesson and André Spicer gave it a name:
The Stupidity Paradox.
But groupthink does not begin when a single person speaks. It begins when everyone anticipates what is better left unsaid.
Act II — The Organised Chaos
Modern organisations are not silent.
They talk incessantly. They organise meetings, produce reports, and multiply presentations, indicators and dashboards.
At first glance, everything seems to bear witness to intense intellectual activity.
Yet, this hubbub does not guarantee that the organisation thinks.
It can even produce the opposite effect: giving the impression that thought is still underway, when it has already been replaced by the staging of it.
That is precisely what is revealed by a scene reported by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer in The Stupidity Paradox.
An intern is helping to draft a government report that is likely to guide public policy and affect millions of people.
Curious, she asks what really matters in this job.
The reply comes without hesitation:
«One or two impressive PowerPoint slides.»
At first glance, the scene might bring a smile to your face.
Yet it reveals a much deeper shift.
The intern no doubt arrives with the idea that the essential thing lies in the quality of the analysis, the strength of the arguments, the verification of data or the relevance of conclusions. She is entering an organisation that she imagines to be more sophisticated than anything she has known so far, and which she assumes will teach her the rigor of the real world.
Yet what she discovers is almost the exact opposite.
What matters first is not the thought itself, but the form in which that thought can be presented.
The problem isn't PowerPoint.
A presentation can clarify an idea, structure a decision, or make complexity visible. The problem begins when the tool is no longer at the service of reflection, but becomes the primary criterion by which that reflection is judged.
What is then valued is no longer solely:
- the rigor of the analysis; ;
- the complexity of the data; ;
- the relevance of the conclusions ;
but the ability to produce a convincing representation of thought.
What the intern discovers little by little is not just that form matters more than she imagined.
It's because the thought process is already constrained.
It no longer consists in truly opening up possibilities, questioning presuppositions or challenging the initial framework. It consists in organising a few acceptable options, making them legible, and then giving one of them the appearance of self-evidence.
Reasoning is no longer progressing towards a conclusion.
It is constructed to produce a concluding effect.
A form of Administrative QED.
Once this trip is accepted, it is not limited to presentations.
The same logic can be extended to the whole organisation.
What matters is no longer just what is done, thought or decided, but the way in which it can be shown, summarised, formulated and rendered acceptable.
PowerPoint is then merely an early symptom.
It heralds a broader transformation: the moment when the image begins to organise reality instead of simply representing it.
At this stage, the problem is no longer just that a presentation simplifies thought.
Every presentation simplifies. Every decision requires reducing, prioritising, and making things intelligible.
The problem begins when simplification becomes simplistic; when the format decides in advance what can be thought, discussed and remembered.
Complexity does not disappear because it has been resolved.
She is disappearing because she no longer fits in the frame.
Act III — Procedure progressively replaces understanding
A recent graduate enters a large institution with the feeling of having a lot to learn.
He studied the major economic theories: Keynes for the role of demand and public intervention, Friedman for monetary effects, Schumpeter for innovation, the entrepreneur and creative destruction. He followed a long, demanding training, but one that was still largely theoretical.
His results earned him recruitment by a major bank. He is among the top of his graduating class.
But when he joins the organisation, something escapes him.
Meetings move quickly. Documents seem to assume what they should explain. Acronyms pile up. Models produce results. Meanwhile, decisions are being made.
And he wonders if he is the only one who doesn't really understand.
At first, he thinks the problem stems from him.
Then he discovers the ordinary reality of large organisations: everyone is assigned for a long time to a precise task, sometimes very technical, often very narrow. You learn a segment, a procedure, a product, a part of the system.
You become competent somewhere.
But this local expertise does not necessarily provide a global understanding.
We know who to contact, what formula to use, what document to produce, what procedure to follow, how to speak the language of the milieu.
But that does not mean one actually understands the whole that one helps to make function.
It is not incompetence.
It's formatting.
The employee learns the company's procedures: the documents to produce, the approvals to obtain, the formulas to use, the deadlines to meet, the words that reassure and those best avoided.
He is learning to do his bit properly.
But this procedural skill does not necessarily give him an understanding of the whole.
Local competence can thus coexist with global blindness.
Taylorism, as a scientific division of labour, did not stop at the assembly lines.
It gradually spread to offices, public administrations, banks, consultancies and even universities.
Complexity had not disappeared. It had simply been sliced up into a multitude of procedures that no one needed to connect to one another anymore.
Act IV — When the image replaces reality
The politician takes office with a promise of control.
He spoke of direction, of reform, of recovery, of sovereignty, of responsibility. He asked citizens to entrust him with power because he claimed to know where to lead the country.
Then he comes to power.
And reality appears.
It has nothing of an electoral manifesto.
It is made of accumulated debt, slow institutions, legal constraints, economic dependencies, diplomatic alliances, financial markets, external crises, internal power struggles and changing public opinions.
Those in power then discover what election campaigns often conceal: governing does not merely mean wishing.
To govern is to enter into a system already in motion.
In the past, political skill was often recognised by the ability to surround oneself with the right people. A leader might not know everything, but they had to know how to choose those who did: ministers, advisers, diplomats, economists, senior civil servants.
But when situations become too constrained, when room for manoeuvre is reduced, when real decisions become too costly, another logic appears.
It is no longer just about governing.
We must hold on.
Hold on until the next deadline.
Hold out until the next crisis.
Hold out until the next speech.
Hold on long enough to explain that the chaos comes from yesterday, that the difficulties were inherited, that the opponent would have done worse, and that the trajectory remains the right one regardless.
This is where the image begins to replace reality.
No, because reality is fading.
But because it is becoming less manageable than the narrative being constructed about it.
Public policy is no longer presented merely as a succession of decisions. It is becoming a permanent narrative.
Each event must be integrated into a structuring narrative: reform versus inertia, responsibility against demagoguery, strength versus weakness, success against threat.
The narrative provides coherence.
He simplifies.
He makes the action easy to follow.
But it can also produce an apparent continuity where reality remains fragmented, contradictory or uncertain.
Within this context, certain decisions take on a primarily symbolic value. Certain stances function as immediate signals: asserting a line, projecting an image of firmness, and responding to a visible expectation.
The problem is not that a politician communicates.
Every policy needs to be explained.
The problem begins when the narrative becomes more stable than the reality it claims to organise.
When narrative becomes the primary criterion for evaluation, decisions risk being judged less on their consequences than on their consistency with the story being told.
Giving up is becoming difficult.
Acknowledging a mistake is becoming costly.
Nuance is becoming suspicious.
Power no longer seeks merely to act on reality.
He seeks to maintain the image of being in control.
The image therefore does not replace reality because political leaders necessarily ignore the real.
She replaces it because reality has become too difficult to control, whereas the image remains manageable.
Act V — The cost of organisational silence
In many organisations, individuals gradually stop asking certain questions.
Not because they don't see anything.
No, because they don't understand a thing.
But because they know that certain questions cost too much.
They create tensions.
They slow down decisions.
They weaken a position.
They can close off access, jeopardise a career, and isolate the person who asks them.
So, little by little, silence descends.
An issue has not been reported.
A fault is played down.
A contradiction is avoided.
An objection is postponed for later.
And the system ends up validating itself.
In highly centralised organisations, this mechanism becomes even more dangerous. The more power is concentrated, the more valuable loyalty becomes. The more valuable loyalty becomes, the more costly contradiction becomes.
The system no longer even needs to forbid criticism.
It is enough for everyone to anticipate the cost.
The actors adjust silently. They guess what is better to say, what is better to keep quiet about, what is better not to formulate too clearly.
Contradiction does not disappear just because it is impossible.
She disappears because she becomes a risk.
In this type of configuration, the speech of the centre gradually frees itself from any internal limit. The less it is contradicted, the more demonstrative it becomes. The less it encounters objections, the more likely escalation becomes.
One-upmanship does not always stem from strength.
It sometimes arises from a lack of restraint.
When this logic is applied to decisions of major strategic scope, its consequences can extend far beyond the framework of a single organisation.
It is no longer just about preserving an image, maintaining a line, or protecting a career.
Sometimes it's about war, peace, escalation, sanctions, alliances, irreversible decisions.
And yet, the mechanism remains the same.
Nobody wants to be the one who says too early that the trajectory is dangerous.
Nor be accused of weakness.
Nobody wants to appear to be playing into the opponent's hands.
So the status of the criticism changes.
He who questions undermines unity.
The shade lacks firmness.
He who asks for proof slows down the action.
He who contradicts becomes suspect.
In certain contexts, critical thinking can thus be dismissed before it is even examined: pro-Russian here, pro-Iranian there, defeatist elsewhere, or simply a prophet to be cut down.
The question being asked is no longer:
Is that true?
She becomes:
Whose side are you on?
This is how escalation becomes possible.
Well, nobody sees the danger.
But because everyone hesitates to be the one to name it.
This mechanism runs through all five acts.
In the first, nobody dared say what they saw.
In the second, presentation replaced reflection.
In the third, procedure was gradually replacing comprehension.
In the fourth, the image replaced reality.
In the fifth, silence becomes a condition of survival within the organisation.
Every time, the mechanism is different.
But the result is the same: the system continues to function while progressively losing its capacity to contradict itself.
That, perhaps, is the most dangerous form of functional stupidity.
Not the absence of intelligence.
Yet the methodical organisation of the conditions under which intelligence ceases to be exercised.
Gradually, critical thinking is no longer absent: it becomes useless, costly, and then dangerous.
An organisation thinks when it can hear a contradiction without turning the person who formulates it into an adversary.
Epilogue — Who will still say the king is naked?
There is always a fragile moment when advice can still be heard.
A time when contradiction is not yet a betrayal.
A moment when telling the truth remains possible before becoming dangerous.
This moment is passing quickly.
When the leader has chosen, when the narrative is established, when the organisation has aligned itself, any new advice already looks like a challenge.
Like in Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the illusion doesn't hold because it is credible.
It holds together because it is shared.
The tragedy of power is therefore not just that there are still naked kings.
It's just that around them, a whole theatre keeps on playing.
The advisers know their role.
The courtiers know their lines.
The audience know when to clap.
And everyone, at times, perceives the limits, the inconsistencies, the errors.
But everyone remains silent.
Out of interest.
Or caution.
Out of tiredness.
Or fear of losing one's place.
Simply because that's how the system works.
Demeure alors sur une question, sur laquelle le rideau tombe :
dans ces structures où tout pousse à valider plutôt qu’à contredire, qui est encore capable de jouer le rôle de l’enfant ?
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