Confidence vs. Competence

Lack of self awareness can be useful, as well as an enhanced sense of confidence before eventually becoming competent. The Dunning-Kruger curve is a diagram I think about a lot. It’s kind of a funny one.

There is a never ending supply of people out in the world who are happy to march into a situation and confidently pronounce on a subject without a shred of domain knowledge. Possibly there’s a certain gender bias there too.

Perhaps in some way the art of scribing live events is tapping into that human characteristic so deftly exemplified by work of David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Yes it's true you can view those operating in the top left quadrant - of high confidence but low ability - in a negative light. Especially when they hold forth on topics they read about on their phone 10 minutes ago.

Yet there is a time when it can come in handy!

Scribes have to be ‘business agnostic’. We have to be able to switch seamlessly from one sector to another. We use deep listening and a high level of visual skills to do what we do. But standing in front of a room full of sales people and confidently visualising their business in front of them for a day?

Let's face it - that's upper left quadrant work.

But that doesn’t really matter too much, because when we are in the room we are interpreting what is said in the room. It's all their content anyway. Things get complicated when we decide to go deeper. That's when the confidence dips and the hard work, and self awareness, really begins. That's where we start to work on complex business graphics we call ‘Rich Pictures’. Where we say ‘we don’t know it all - lets talk’ and we co-create engaging images for visions, strategies and more. The great thing is, when we work with people over an extended period, we learn more. And can create ever more complex and useful visualisations.

Also… I haven’t read any David Dunning and Justin Kruger’s work. Just looked at their nice graph. I somehow feel that's appropriate here…