Rating your own expertise
Last week I was running an open space to kick off a new community of practice for engineers. While I was wandering around the room I overheard one of the participants make this point about self rating your expertise.
The guy who has done this job for 20 years rates himself as good. But the guy doing it for two years rates themselves as expert. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
Comments
Comments are closed.
Sounds like a very interesting version of something I heard about for the first time last week: the Dunning-Kruger effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect?).
John
When in doubt, one would better over-estimate oneself.
Over-estimation leads to making mistakes, mistakes one may learn from.
Under-estimation leads to not doing anything at all, hence not learning anything.
Thanks for the link John. The Dunning-Kruger effect sounds exactly like what I heard.
What is an “open space”?
Hi, in km4dev we discussed this phenomenon that I observed with organisations too. I liked the model that someone shared about going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence before moving on. Personally I feel communities of practice can play a strong role in making professionals aware of where they stand.
Hi Dennis, Open Space is a facilitation technique, also called Open Space Technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology
I agree Joitske. If you are in a position to witness the practice of your peers and hear their stories, you can better judge your own capabilities. Mind you there is another approach which involves acting into a capability, also called fake it until you make it.
Avi – that is a good approach for having the confidence to take the intiative and learn from mistakes, but of course it is useful to understand that you may be oversetimating your actual knowledge and expertise, in order to be ready to acknowledge the mistakes and learning oportunities.
Joitske – reminds me of “skilled incompetence” of Argyris & Schon, and of Brunsson. As well as the basic fact of being conscious / unconscious of the actual competencies – there are positive and negative psychological consequences of denial and game-theory tactics. Could you give me a reference for that “someone” ?
Regards
Ian
Just noticed Joitske, that Shawn’s response to you “fake it until you can make it” is that game-theory psychological angle I was referring to.
It still helps to actually be aware when you are faking it yourself though.