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Competency Coordinates: Considering Constraints

Making realistic estimates about resources and people needed to achieve goals, understanding own strengths and weaknesses.

Did you know most people are bad at planning?

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Have you heard about the overconfidence bias?

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• People are not only bad at planning – people are also bad and judging their expertise. More almost 25 years ago Justin Kruger and David Dunning described the overconfidence bias, a tendency for people to overestimate they performance in task. The surprising thing about this phenomenon is that the lower the experience with the task, the more people overestimate their performance. This creates a double hurdle where the people that need more awareness about their lack of experience are the ones that do not have the needed experience to make them aware!
• Overconfidence is hands-on with specific behaviours. For example, most busy managers believe that selective attention is highly productive because you can get the message from meetings and reports with a fraction of the attention focus. The problem is that the human mind has the natural tendency to select only what is congruent with our beliefs, and most of the people want to believe they are competent. Another example, it is often considered that is this team conflict is bad thing and, by opposition, team agreement is a good thing. This simplistic view overshadows the fact that agreements are often a result of social centripetal forces towards conformity, and conflicts the much needed expressions of diversity.

Tips to help you handling constraints

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1. Overcome planning fallacies feedback

• Acknowledge the pervasiveness of optimism, even if you consider yourself a pessimist. Listen to Tali Sharot’s TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias) on why the human mind is naturally optimistic and how that can become dangerous and beneficial.
• Create reliable representations about past experiences. For example, next time you finish a project make a brainstorming (preferably with team) to i) list all the cost and time deviations and ii) identify ways to overcome these deviations in the future. This will set an objective and reliable picture about how a well a project went and suggestions about what you can do in the future to overcome the limitations.
• Learn how to improve you judgment with Sir Andrew Likierman’s HBR paper, Likierman, A. (2020, November 24). The Elements of Good Judgment. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/01/theelements-of-good-judgment.

2. Acknowledge your limitations and strengths

• Ask other people about how it is to work with you, about the things they enjoyed the most and about the things they disliked. Don’t engage or justify! Listen, record, identify important areas of improvement and turn these into actionable goals (e.g., you can set the goal “I am going to become less self-centered” and create dedicated time windows for people to talk in meetings and experience engaging with people without talking about yourself). Other people often know more about us then we give credit for. There is research showing that people doing this sort of exercise were more likely to get a job at a job interview!
• A step further, dedicate time to improve self-knowledge. A practical example, take time to fill the online VIA Character Strengths Survey and to carefully read through your results. VIA Character Strengths is extremely well validated measure that can give great insights into how you think, feel, a relate with others. More immersive options are, for instance, coaching and existential psychotherapy.
• Learn more about the tendency to discount our errors. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson have a book right on this topic, named “Mistakes were made but not by me: Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts”. In practice, you can create norms for critical thinking, impartiality, safety in disagreeing, and methodical procedures to contract on biased judgments!