Costs of under-confidence
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com
> Had Linda been more confident, we'd have won.
It appears that Linda kept being right. Regardless, the captain kept not choosing her answers. Perhaps being a poor captain led to the team's defeat, not Linda failing to assert herself properly. Afterall, a good captain should have experience in the world of pub quizzes, and one would expect that he might have seen this sort of situation before. Failing that, based with the empirical evidence of Linda being right often, he probably should have picked her answers more frequently.
I think the larger lesson here is that confidence is a good thing, but relying on it solely can fail miserably as a substitute for having actual knowledge about something.
Linda is smart enough to know she might not be right; smarter quiz players (pub quizzes, Jeopardy, etc) don't blurt out an answer to every question. Claiming someone should 'be more confident' in this case indicates that she knew for a fact that she had the right answer but wasn't assertive. This ignores the more likely scenario: she didn't actually know if she was right.
Yes, the article is stating Linda needed to be more confident - but out of context, what if Linda had tried being more confident and assertive in previous games and had been completely wrong, costing her team the match?
That's exactly what the article is saying, if you follow it to the end: "What matters is that one's confidence be properly calibrated - neither too high, not too low. Very few of us achieve this."
The point is that without proper confidence, there's no chance of success. With proper confidence, there's at least a chance.
Hence the parallel to the "faint heart never won fair lady" aphorism: you're never guaranteed success in love without confidence, but you're guaranteed a shot you never otherwise would have had.
Had the captain been better, he could have picked out which teammates (presumably, Linda) had been better predictors of the correct answer. Instead he chose confidence as the metric.
Key word here is "can". In many leadership circumstances, it is impossible to know the right answer definitively. In those cases, it is best to choose what appears to be the best answer, and stick with it until you have overwhelming evidence otherwise. You need confidence to do that -- and in many cases, unwarranted confidence.
Leadership is all about putting yourself out there to be wrong. Many people are very risk-averse without someone else giving them permission, so you give them permission. But ultimately, who gave you permission? At some point down the chain, the answer has to be "I give myself the permission".
Like it or not, leadership is 90% confidence, 10% competence (and the 10% competence is largely around how well you learn from failure).
However, the most fascinating example is found in large hierarchical organisations (i.e. large corporates and government agencies). Poor managers have no relevant domain knowledge. So the only basis they have for decision making is 'who sounds the most confident', because they lack the ability to judge who is actually correct. Worse still, the 'captains' (managers) decide who gets to be the 'sub-captains' (and therefore future captains).
I watched it happen in real-time once. I worked in a relatively young organisation that put 2-3 incompetent guys in upper management. They made bad hires and bad decisions, because they had zero domain expertise (IT). I was startled at how quickly incompetence spread throughout the organisation, like a metastasising cancer. Within 6 months they had virtually ruined the place, and the (few) competent hires they had made were rapidly jumping ship.
It was like they'd read the Netflix Culture slides (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664) and decided to do the exact opposite...
Sounds like an example of the law of crappy people in action.
http://www.terrencebrown.net/the-law-of-crappy-people/
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/02/ben-horowitz-the-la...
Anyway, I'm actually with the article on this one: it's on Linda to learn to speak up and become more confident. Why? Because of game theory. The situation where everyone projects a realistic assessment of their own confidence is not an evolutionarily-stable strategy. It is trivial to "defect" and project high confidence in an area of low competence, the cost (to the individual) of doing this is low, and the chance of detection is also low in most situations. That means that any large population will tend toward being filled with blowhards; statistically, somebody is gonna do it, and then once they do it everyone else has to become a blowhard to keep up. And so analyzing this rationally, your only choice is to become a blowhard yourself, ideally while also keeping factual discipline so your ideas are themselves usually right.
Interestingly, I've seen some very good managers make their careers off of "confidence arbitrage". Basically, they learn to recognize and surround themselves with people who have low confidence but high competence. They then take the opinions of these individual contributors (which are often right, but often stated equivocally) and then repeat them to upper management with zero doubt, basically providing a confidence boost to other peoples' opinions. This helps viewpoints that are right but imperfectly stated get heard, and it makes the manager seem like a genius. Win-win for everyone.
And I very much agree with your last paragraph: good managers and leaders are people who recognise competence and use it to further an organisation's goals. I don't mean that in the "take credit for your subordinate's idea" kind of way, as that's clearly an unsustainable strategy (the uncredited start withholding information and ideas, eventually).
On the game theory/evolutionarily stable strategy side of things though, I think it depends on context and perspective. If the context is one with a ubiquity of good managers, the pay-off for 'unjustified confidence' is probably pretty low or even negative. Also, as this is a multi-round game, the pay-off for 'unjustified confidence' gets lower and lower with each successive round (as good managers will factor past experience into their estimation of subordinate competence).
On the flip side, in a context with mostly incompetent managers, I'd agree the dominant strategy for individuals, competent and incompetent alike, is to 'act confident'. Although, as mentioned before, the competent are hobbled by the dunning-kruger effect here. Even if they weren't (i.e. competent and incompetent subordinates display equal levels of confidence), the outcome for the organisation would be indistinguishable from random decision making. In other words, you could replace managers with a coin (or a n-sided die, for problems with n possible solutions). And you don't have to pay coins or dice six figure salaries, making it the better option...
From the organisation's perspective, it seems crazy to rely on getting the competent people to 'be more confident'. In fact, it seems impossible. If your organisation needs to rely on 'confidence' to determine who is competent, then by definition it cannot directly discern which employees are competent. So how would it know which employees to encourage to be 'more confident'? This seems to reduce back to the '(at best) random decision making' outcome in the previous paragraph.
Funnily enough, if you factor in the dunning-kruger effect, in the 'bad managers' context the best way to make decisions (on average) would be to follow the advice of the 'least confident sounding' employees.
The only viable (albeit less hilarious) solution from the organisation's perspective (and therefore dominant strategy) is to try very hard to only hire competent leaders and managers.
That's correct specifically because in the absence of the ability to judge competence (the original research by Dunning and Kruger showed that those low in competence overestimated the competence of others as well as their own), confidence becomes the stand-in. So over time if you don't start with the most competent people in positions of leadership, and maybe even if you do, you end up with the most confident (and probably least competent) people in them over several refresh cycles.
Longer form piece on the subject: https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-dangers-of-confidence/
On a real team, as opposed to what I describe as "a group of people who just happen to be working at the same goal," the leader and the others should understand each other well enough to know when they speak confidently they'll be taken seriously, and to back off when they are unsure.
In the typical corporate "team" (i.e., people who were told to work together), you get exactly the behavior you describe because people don't know each other well, don't think as a group -- tends to be everyone looking out for themselves, and have little invested in the success of the team because they know that their contributions aren't likely to be valued very highly.
> I think the larger lesson here is that confidence is
> a good thing, but relying on it solely can fail miserably
> as a substitute for having actual knowledge about
> something.
I'm reminded of the film "The last King of Scotland":
[Idi Amin] I want you to tell me what to do.
[Nicholas Garrigan] You want ME to tell YOU what to do?
[Idi Amin] Yes, you are my advisor. You are
the only one I can trust in here.
You should have told me not to
throw the Asians out,
in the first place.
[Nicholas Garrigan] I DID!
[Idi Amin] But you did not persuade me,
Nicholas. You did not persuade me!
Of course, in their context it's a bit more complicated. :)
There's not much value in picking advisors who you prefer to ignore.
Having a culture where it's ok to fail is very important for the under-confident to progress. Knowing that a wrong outcome is little more than an opportunity for learning can be incredibly empowering.
I've been playing for about 4 years in a pub quiz. We've won once and are considered a strong team. However, the difference between the a strong team, and the better team in a night, is the fact that our team fosters a "no suggestion is a dumb suggestion" policy. No matter how stupid you think your answer is, you are encouraged to say it. In fact, if we see body language from a person hesitating we're quick to jump in and say "Spit it out! Just say it!"
We essentially create a safe zone for our team members to not worry about the consequences of a wrong answer. There were so many times where a completely wrong suggestion makes another teammate say, "Hey! Wait, I think I remember!"
We also have a policy of if a person has a different answer than the rest, then he/she has to "fight for it". That is, you have to convince the rest of the team. By having a "fight for it" rule, we put controlled confrontation on the centre of the table and let people hash it out. There is no regret, or fear, or worrying about feelings. It's just a normal part of our evening that is done with humour and friendliness. Firm, but friendly!
By doing the above, we instil confidence in every team member. Those that are more confident by their nature, can still be challenged by anyone and keeps them in check, and the weaker confident ones feel safer to step forward when they need to. It balances out and our team has absolutely great chemistry because of it.
I've also played team sports for most of my life and some of the best teams I've played for had former professional athletes. Since they were stronger than the rest and more confident, they always raised their hand and took the blame for any mistake! It was quite funny because we knew my screw up was not their fault, but they would make an excuse about how they should've done 'X' and I wouldn't have screwed up.
Needless to say, that allowed players like me that weren't former pros, to be at ease and to be more confident and give my best, knowing that the strongest player on the team wasn't going to look down on me for every mistake.
It was a very interesting dynamic where the more confident person ensured that the less confident person is playing their best and it raised their confidence. Again, it is a kind of delicate balance that can change on any given night.
I think it's just human nature. Underconfidence is the exact opposite. Conducting you with underconfidence will lead to no one taking you seriously. Unfortunately, moving up in your career requires for you to convince people to have confidence in you, so this is a skill everyone needs to learn.
I like Jason Roberts article on Luck Surface Area http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
This rings much closer to the truth in my experience. The best results are some combination of what you suggest plus the confidence and ability to communicate about the good work that you have done.
This reminds me of my musician days, when we sometimes talked about the four stages of progression from beginner to pro.
1. You know you don't know (beginner) 2. You don't know you don't know (cocky amateur - over confident) 3. You don't know you know (talented amateur - under confident) 4. You know you know (seasoned pro)
- Socrates
source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904433437045775489...
There's some (disputed) evidence that Winston Churchill suffered from depression. Perhaps this is why he was such an effective war-time prime minister: in a time of war, if your perception of reality is inaccurate, you're less likely to survive.
It's interesting to contrast the speeches of Chamberlain and Churchill with this in mind. On the one hand you have Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" speech after concluding the Munich Agreement:
"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."
And on the other you have Churchill's first speech to the House of Commons after becoming Prime Minister:
"I would say to the House as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival."