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There is a long history of work in organization theory that encourages caution in relation to rationality and smartness in organizations. Perhaps the best-known strand is the work that charts the limits to rationality in organizations. The concept of ‘bounded rationality’ captures actors' inability to make completely rational decisions due to lack of time, information, and information processing capacity (Simon, 1972). This means actors will make, at best, reasonable or acceptable decisions, but only within the bounds of the resources and time available. Some studies point to how much work is conducted in ‘mindless’ ways (Ashforth and Fried, 1988). People carry out their tasks based on existing cognitive scripts that specify ‘a typical sequence of occurrences in a given situation’ (p. 306). There are formal and informal procedures that guide responses to situations and demands. When learnt, these informal procedures make it possible for individuals to act without too much thinking, which promotes cognitive efficiency. But learned scripts can blind their adherents to processes that fall squarely outside them. A similar idea is articulated by Argyris (1986) who points to the prevalence of ‘skilled incompetence’ in large organizations. He argues that many managers and professionals are skilled because they know what to do when faced with a situation, and often do it instantaneously. However, they are incompetent insofar as this skill leads to ultimately negative outcomes by avoiding difficult and searching questions. Skilled incompetence is often reinforced by defensive routines in an organization. These are routines that make certain issues undiscussable and help managers to avoid surprise, embarrassment, and threat. However, these routines also allow managers to avoid learning and inquiry into difficult questions. The result is that the organization becomes trapped into patterns where the very skills and abilities of employees lead to habitual avoidance of asking difficult but pressing questions. The garbage-can model of decision-making (Cohen et al., 1972) places a greater emphasis on ambiguity, dynamics, and unpredictability in organizations. It highlights how making decisions often involves a more or less random configuration of problems, solutions, and opportunities. Building on this, March (1996) argues that ‘foolishness’ is required in complex environments with ambiguous goal preferences. Foolishness is an exploratory kind of reasoning whereby we act before we think. ‘Foolish’ action helps to clarify, shape, and test preferences. It allows trial through action and imperviousness to feedback. This facilitates new activities which have yet to show evidence of being successful (March, 2006). Here, the high level of ambiguity simply prevents people from mobilizing their cognitive capacities fully, and acting rationally. Another strand of research highlights the role played by ignorance (e.g. Abbott, 2010; Roberts and Armitage, 2008; Smithson, 1989; Ungar, 2008). This work points out how ‘a lack of knowledge or awareness of where knowledge exists or, more precisely, is claimed to exist’ (Ungar, 2008, p. 303, emphasis in original) is an endemic aspect of modern knowledge intensive settings such as science or government policy making. This is because at the same time that modern fields of knowledge produce a sense of certainty about particular issues, they also create a sense of uncertainty about other issues. For instance, scientific inquiry into climate change has produced a sense of certainty about some issues (such as the long run increase in planetary heat in the last century), but also revealed new areas of ignorance (such as the precise causes of it) (Ungar, 2008). This kind of ‘expert’ or acknowledged ignorance sits alongside ‘amateur’ or denied ignorance (Abbott, 2010). An excellent example of this is a study that found that senior managers frequently were ignorant of the technical details of Total Quality Management programmes and, thus, had unrealistic expectations of to expect when they were adopted (Zbaracki, 1998). This highlights how ‘pseudo-knowledge’ allows people to confuse superficial familiarity with a deeper understanding of the subject matter. A belief in mastery and knowledge, then, hides a ‘deeper’ level of ignorance. The concepts of bounded-rationality, skilled incompetence, garbage-can decision making, foolishness, mindlessness, and (denied) ignorance take us some way to understanding the borders to smartness. However, we believe that there are sharper deviations from smartness that are not accurately captured by the concepts detailed above. These ideas hardly call into question the field assumptions that see the mobilization of cognitive capacities as central to organizational life. Many of the concepts discussed above tend to focus on the inevitable limitations of rational knowledge and intelligence. They also propose ‘softer’, more pragmatic versions. This means that the other side to smartness, which lies outside semi-rational functioning, is largely missed. The concept of ignorance focuses on content and indicates that just adding knowledge through the use of experts or education would deal with the issue. This tells us little about the limits to the active use (or non-use) of cognitive and intellectual capacities. Mindlessness is somewhat different because it points to how templates for cognition make routinized and efficient behaviour possible. It focuses on rather narrow and predictable elements such as cues and scripts. Like bounded rationality, this work often emphasizes a form of efficiency. By doing so, it largely ignores the broader issues of lack of reflection or questioning. Something similar can be said about Argyris's (1986) idea of skilled incompetence, where the norms of efficient interaction sometimes mean that awareness of and dealing with problems is avoided. In addition, each of these concepts tends to have a cognitive bias towards ‘embrained’ processing of knowledge. This focus tends to obfuscate affective or motivational issues including anxiety, uncertainty, and unwillingness to disrupt organizational harmony or efforts to secure a sense of self. This research does not clarify how cognitive limitations are linked to affective issues. Perhaps even more importantly, this research does not consider how issues of power and politics may fuel the disinclination to use intellectual resources. To address these shortcomings, we introduce the concept of functional stupidity.