Loading...Have you ever wondered why, despite all the smart, talented people in the world, massive, seemingly idiotic mistakes are still made on a pretty regular basis? An example given in the video above was when Nasa, in an act of trying to cut expenses, burned many old useless tapes… including the one original film of Neil Armstrong and his crew landing on the moon (we do still have tapes made for TV reproduction, but in much lower quality). Nasa is full of incredibly smart and capable people, but that still happened. Why?
It seems as if a large portion of the population are simply incompetent at their various jobs, or at least that’s what Laurence Peter, a Canadian educator and “heirarchologist”, theorized. Called the Peter Principle, Laurence Peter’s theory tries to explain why, in a common corporate hierarchy, incompetent people can be stuck in high-power jobs. The great video above, made by Adam Westbrook for Delve, talks all about the Peter Principle and how it explains why everything goes wrong occasionally.