Why Smart Teams Make
Dumb Choices
It’s rarely about intelligence or information. It’s actually about what’s driving the choice.
Sound Familiar?
- Managers avoid the hard conversation until it becomes a crisis.
- Disagreement happens in the parking lot, not the meeting.
- Everyone half-knew it was a bad call—and it happened anyway.
- New initiatives launch with energy, then quietly die.
- Busywork wins. The important work waits.
- All firefighting, no prevention.
- Input gets gathered after the decision is already made.
- There's one person everyone just... works around.
None of these are intelligence problems. Your people are smart. Their choices are coming from somewhere else—and every item on that list traces back to one of the Four Skills featured in The Three Drivers:
Drive. Resilience. Curiosity. Collaboration.
Find out which one is costing your team.
Take the five-minute self-check. Your results on the spot—no email required.
The Three Drivers was created by Jeff Gaines, who has spent 30 years helping clients like Salesforce, Adobe, Pfizer, Merck, and the U.S. Army, watching smart people make—and unmake—dumb choices. An author, Master Facilitator, and TEDx speaker (1M+ views), he built this framework to explain what he kept seeing: it was never about intelligence. The self-check puts three decades of pattern-recognition into five minutes.