In the the first of two pieces about competency and self-awareness we question how do you know that you are really competent and whether you are really competent enough to judge whether you you competent....
How good are you?
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How good are you at your job, at all the different aspects of it? How about the skills you have outside of work: hobbies, parenting, driving or even writing blog posts.
How confident would you say you are? Do you walk into any given situation knowing you’ve got it covered or do you over-reach, your over-confidence tripping you up from time to time. Maybe you lack confidence; you know the answers before most people but you just aren’t certain enough of your own ability to speak up.
You probably have a reasonable view on the answers to these two questions, but the more challenging question is: do you really think you are qualified to answer either of them?
If you consider a person that is clearly over-confident, how do you think they would answer the question of how good they are? How would they describe the relationship between their confidence and their ability?
Maybe they admit to having a sense of being somewhat overconfident but they won’t know how far out of balance their belief in their own ability is from their actual ability. The inverse will be true if you consider someone that you know is lacking in confidence.
It follows that many people will not have an accurate view of their ability, but don’t know it.
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How do you know that you’re not one of them?
Social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning released a paper in 1999 to describe a number of studies they had performed on this gap between an individual’s ability and their own self-assessment. The paper is titled ‘Unskilled and Unaware of it’ which gives a fairly clear indication of what their conclusions were.
They describe a paradox that to understand how good you are at a skill, you would need a good level of understanding of that skill, otherwise you are not qualified to make that assessment. To paraphrase their summary:
“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities. This occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in a domain suffer a dual burden: not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to recognize it.”
Ironically, they found that not only do the test subjects with the lowest levels of skill over-estimate their ability, those with the highest levels of skill underestimate their ability.
Subjects with poor ability didn’t think they were better than experts, they did think they were average to above average. The experts in the top quartile knew they were better than average, but under-estimated how much better they were than the average. There are a number of interviews with Dunning, such as this one with Vox, in which he describes some of these effects in greater detail.
There are a number statistical and behavioral explanations offered for this effect with all the debate typical of this type of study, but it does serve to give an illustration of how to manage performance development and keep an awareness of actual against perceived performance and avoiding the costs of over- or under-confidence.
If you were to perform a search on the Dunning Kruger effect the most common result is a ski-ramp style graph with points labelled with phrases like ‘Point of maximum incompetence’ - and example from Business Times is here.These graphs were never part of Dunning and Kruger’s original research but they do serve to illustrate the effect.
We will expand on the most common forms of this ‘Dunning Kruger curve’ here to explain why you may be surrounded by people who are incompetent and unaware of it and what to do about it.
Of course, you may discover that you are susceptible to this effect, we would never dream of judging, particularly as we know that we are as likely as anyone to suffer from it!
This graph shows the ideal relationship between confidence and competence: as competence increases on the horizontal axis the level of confidence is increasing at the same rate. For these purposes, we will assume that confidence is the same as the level of awareness an individual has of their ability.
The dashed lines show the boundaries of a healthy balance: drop below the lower dashed line and your lack of confidence undermines your ability, rise above the upper line and your confidence in your abilities has exceeded what you can actually achieve.
Setting out on a new skill....
For many skills, there is an initial period in which there is a formal training period: you may be at school or university, you may be in lessons to learn how to drive or you may be following a structured on line course.
In these situations you will be following the line shown – you have regular assessments and feedback that give you a clear indication of your ability in any skill.
Gaining confidence (and over-confidence)....
At some point, you will leave formal training and start using your skills, this is often where confidence and capability become disconnected for a number of reasons.
We have a tendency to believe we are growing at the same rate as we achieved under formal training; without structure it is actually more likely that this growth is slowing or has actually reached a plateau. In many cases post-training experience is more appropriate to the skills as it is practiced but the rate at which we gain experience is typically not linear or measurable.
We often struggle to give an objective assessment of our role in success or failure. We will often believe that failure is the result of external conditions: other people failed, the environment changed or we were unlucky. We believe our successes are the direct result of our skill and ability.
As mentioned previously, unless you understand a skill you cannot judge your level of ability in that skill. If you are incompetent, you do not have enough knowledge to know that you are. This further projects into how you judge your ability against those of your peers or your managers.
You may see the mistakes made in other departments or by your leadership and without knowing the context, constraints or compromises made by these groups you will assume incompetence on their part. Your lack of knowledge then leads you to the belief that you are one of the smartest people you know, which will ironically reduce your belief that you need to grow or develop.
The crash from over-confidence to despair...
This is the point where things will start to get interesting for you – the point of maximum incompetence. This represents a tipping point; you will find yourself in a situation where your lack of ability will become painfully obvious to you.
You may have completed a course in a foreign language, you spend your spare time practicing to yourself or other novices and then you visit the country and realize you don’t understand what they are saying. You may enter a competition where you match your skills against other, more capable people, you may crash your car or you may have a project review or performance appraisal in which your failings are pointed out to you in a way that you cannot deflect.
Following this failure, you may have a crash in confidence- this will often reduce your belief in your own ability below the actual level. You may even consider giving up the skill entirely. You may not be able to see that your ability is actually still growing as result of your failure – you have actually gained some significant and useful knowledge as a result of your failure; you just may not fully appreciate it at the time.
Review, realization and recovery...
Ideally, you will recover from this crash. You may take in the learning you’re your failure, you may take a pragmatic review of your skills and you may resolve to work harder and will recover back to the point of balance between your confidence and your capability.
Is there an alternative to this cycle?
There are, you'll be pleased to know, ways to avoid and minimize these effects. There are ways to recognize them as they are happening and make use of them to progress your development.
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We will be discussing these in the second part of this series - click the link below to find out more.
