Klutz Power

Klutz power is a tool the incompetent but lovable use to get out of things.

Imagine you ask your partner to do the dishes, but they keep dropping them on the ground. Get out of here, you sweet idiot!—you yell as you take over dish duty. But they still get points for trying.

Or a baby lying in its crib, a helpless blob. Sweet helpless idiot baby. You’ll need to get a job in 16 years or so, but for now let me just make sure you are Thoroughly Swaddled and Pinch Your Cheeks.

Or consider these situations:

• 🙉 Your plumber turns off her hearing aid.
• 💔 Instead of breaking up with someone, you become worse at relationship’ing and they breakup with you.
• 👍🏼 Your boss asks you to do something useless, so you say yes but conveniently “forget”.

What stands out to me about klutz power is that—unlike many forms of power—it often works upwards. When your boss can’t afford yes, but is too thin-skinned for no. Maybe it involves a sense of uncertainty. If I leave things alone, what are the odds things get done right? Or maybe it involves an increased energy cost. Is it worth my time getting through to you?

In this post I’ll discuss 2 key aspects of klutz power:

• Where it comes from
• Varieties of klutz power

Unpacking klutz power: the stereotype content model #

I think the best explanation for klutz power comes from the Stereotype Content Model in social psychology. This model frames our stereotypes of different groups (e.g. different jobs; different ethnicities; different folks) along two axes: warmth and competence.

This is shown in the 2x2 grid below, adapted from the original paper.

	Low Competence	High Competence
High Warmth	Pity e.g. elderly people	Admiration e.g. our ingroup
Low Warmth	Contempt e.g. welfare recipients	Envy e.g. rich people

Notice the difference between the two groups in the Low Competence column (left side):

• Pity: Low Competence, High Warmth. Attributed to elderly people. These are those that people perceive as low competence, but who they are open to helping.
• Contempt: Low Competence, Low Warmth. Attributed to welfare recipients. These are those that people perceive as in need of help, but who they don’t want to help.

A key factor in what puts groups in high vs low warmth is perceived intent: whether the group is perceived as intending to help or harm.

It seems clear that Klutz power relies on people feeling Pity (Low Competence and High Warmth zone), due to the klutzer appearing willing to help, but projecting incompetence (or using it as an excuse for failure).

Keep in mind that this model is about stereotypes—people’s perceptions of groups, measured in various ways (e.g. questionnaires).

The Stereotype Competence Model covers a broad range of phenomena—from benevolent sexism, to racial stereotypes—and is worth reading about in depth.

Varieties of klutz power #

This section focuses on using, or interacting with users of klutz power.

We’ve covered a number of situations involving klutz power—from turning off your hearing aid, to getting dumped, to ignoring your boss. In this section, I want to try and help us categorize these kinds of klutz power activities.

I’ll decompose klutz power along two dimensions: overall outcome and klutzer’s strategy, shown in the table below.

	accidental klutz	deliberate klutz
beneficial outcome	Mr Magoo e.g. disabling hearing aid; being a baby	polite “no” e.g. forgetting boss’s instruction
harmful outcome	untrained / avoidant e.g. getting dumped; dropping dishes	competitive: weaponized incompetence

In the top row, where the effect is beneficial for those involved, people experience klutz-power-as-a-service (whether on purpose or not). In the bottom row, klutzing leads to overall harmful outcomes, though there may be some benefit to the klutzer.

Mr Magoo: accidental benefit #

If you turn off your hearing aid without intending to tune people out, and get the job done fast because no one is bugging you, then you’ve accidentally stumbled into a nice situation. You are Mr Magoo—the elderly cartoon gentleman whose nearsightedness gets him into precarious situations, but who always emerges oblivious and unscathed.

A key here is that a person can turn off their hearing aid, and still preserve the idea “I intend to listen to you”. Turning off a hearing aid is just a return to your baseline. If you plugged your ears with your fingers, things might not go as well, because you have unsympathetically incapacitated yourself.

Note that with being a Mr Magoo, I’ve assumed the person didn’t deliberately turn off their hearing aid to tune people out. If they did, I would put it in the Polite “no” category.

Polite “no”: deliberate benefit #

Often, people give us tasks that will ultimately work against their goals. In this case, klutz power is a polite way of declining for their benefit.

There are a lot of reasons why you might need to politely decline something via klutz:

• Saving face: sometimes it’s rude or a jab at someone’s authority to outright decline a request.
• Energy conserving: it might be more efficient (for you, them, or both).

One place I see this show up is with people at non-profits, who manage programming for big donors.

A big donor to a non-profit program often checks two boxes:

• Power to kill the program (or line of work).
• Desire to influence its direction, while out of touch with reality.

In this case, the program director acts as a special handler. Their job is to wrangle the donor, making them feel heard and listened to, while mitigating the impact of their bad ideas.

Another case, called creative incompetence in The Peter Principle, is when an employee displays enough incompetence to prevent getting a “promotion” that might actually work against them (e.g. you want to do hands-on carpentry but now you are managing a team of carpenters).

Contrast the Polite “no” version of klutz power to Radical Candor. Radical Candor emphasizes the <Personal Care x Challenge Directly> front door. You are taking the <Warm x Incompetent> basement window escape route.

Untrained / avoidant: accidental harm #

Prior to training on a task, your inability to achieve a certain level of performance on the task is a form of klutz power. Going back to the example of getting out of dishes, by accidentally dropping some on the ground—assuming you weren’t doing it on purpose—you are unintentionally exerting power over your partner.

Here are few ways this situation could play out:

• You continue to do it, and it eventually turns into a neglected responsibility (harmful intent).
• You trade doing dishes for another job to preserve helpful intent.
• You defuse the klutz through training, structure, or tools (e.g. sticky gloves).

The trickier case is a person who—instead of ending a relationship—klutzes their responsibilities so that their partner ends up breaking up with them. To the extent that this isn’t deliberate, this sounds like avoidance. Breaking up is hard, and klutz power is an escape hatch. “It’s not me it’s you”, your partner says—failure achieved.

Competitive: weaponized incompetence #

If you are being a klutz on purpose, and with harmful intent, then you have weaponized your incompetence. This can quickly move things into the low warmth category.

Here’s an interesting examples of competitive klutz:

Deterrence. You might induce klutz in yourself in order to stop someone from taking an action. For example, imagine you are playing a game of chicken—where two people in cars drive toward each other, and the first person who swerves out of the way loses. If you disable your steering wheel, and tape your gas pedal down, you are unable to lose the game (and the other person should quit; see Thomas Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict).

In conclusion #

I think there are three important lessons to take away from all these manifestations of klutz power:

• Klutz power is used by those seen as warm and incompetent, generally by evoking pity.
• It can be good for everyone, especially when frankness isn’t an option.
• It can be bad in cases of a lack of training or avoidance. Or worse, when used competitively (harmful intent).

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Thanks to Anthony Baker for reviewing this post. This post was originally drafted in 2020, and essentially completed in 2023!