It's entirely possible that you've never heard of strategic incompetence and yet that you are, at the same time, a lifelong expert at it. If you aren't, you know someone who is. Strategic incompetence is the art of avoiding undesirable tasks by pretending to be unable to do them, and though the phrase was apparently only recently coined in a Wall Street Journal article, the concept is surely as old as humanity. Modern-day exemplars include the office colleague who responds to the photocopier message "clear paper jam" by freezing in melodramatic pseudo-panic until someone else steps forward to help; you're equally guilty if you've ever evaded a household task or DIY project by claiming you might screw things up. ("I'd do the laundry - I'm just worried I'll damage your clothes.") The Journal interviewed one executive who'd managed to avoid organising the office picnic for several years running. "You'd be amazed," he noted, "at how much I don't know about picnics."
What swiftly happens, the masters of strategic incompetence learn, is that people stop expecting you to undertake certain tasks; they no longer ask you to do them, and they adjust how they rate you: your failure to perform the activity stops counting against you. If all this sounds overly Machiavellian, it's worth noting that it's only a personalised version of what corporate types refer to as "expectations management", which is a key component of any company's customer-relations strategy. If you want satisfied customers, it's certainly wise to act in ways that will satisfy them. But it's also wise to pay attention to (and, if possible, influence) their criteria for feeling satisfied.
Most of us are bad at this, because deep down we want to please people, whether in hope of personal gain or out of what the author Elizabeth Hilts calls "toxic niceness": the chronic urge to please resulting from the fear of confrontation. I realise I'm not exactly part of the target market for her pop-psychology book Getting In Touch With Your Inner Bitch - she identifies toxic niceness as an overwhelmingly female phenomenon - but she's on to something, I think, that crosses gender boundaries. Seen from this perspective, expectations management isn't just for lazy people who want to avoid boring tasks. Training our bosses, partners or children not to expect a "yes" in response to every single request might be crucial for preserving sanity.
If you start small, it's surprisingly easy to begin adjusting others' expectations. It's like strength training: gradually, you build up tolerance. If you think you shoulder an unfair burden of household chores, pick one, don't do it, and monitor what happens. If you're driven crazy at work by ceaseless emails demanding instant responses, try always waiting a few hours to respond, even when you've no reason to wait. Far better to have a reputation as someone who reliably replies within 24 hours than someone who replies within seconds - because in the latter case, as soon as you fail to respond instantly, you'll be seen as underperforming. Thus do the people who try hardest to please end up annoying people more than those who don't try so hard. No, it's not fair. Well spotted.
oliver.burkeman@ theguardian.com
