Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

Tough Things First

A cognitive bias that occurs when someone overestimates their knowledge or abilities in a particular area can wreak havoc. In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn explores ways to avoid it.

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Rob Artigo: I had been looking around for different subject ideas and I came across a term called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s about cognitive bias that occurs when people with limited knowledge or skill in a certain area overestimate their abilities. And then I asked AI to define it because it called some information from around the web, so that’s my source on the definition, but I was able to see that this is accurate.

So the definition goes like this. “The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after Cornell University psychologist, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who first described the effect back in 1999.” So it’s been around a little while. It’s new to me. “The Dunning-Kruger effect can lead to mistakes, poor decision-making and mistrust from others.”

And this is why I’m getting into this because in business I know that you’ve had to deal with creative teams at low levels, medium levels, and high levels of getting things done and I’m sure that every once in a while you’ve run into some of these situations. Because it can lead to mistakes, poor decision making and mistrust from others, it’s based on the idea that you don’t know something, you also don’t have the ability to recognize you don’t know it.

Is that something that you … specifically that thing. If somebody that you’ve run into is doing something and they’re not doing well at it because they refuse to recognize that they don’t know what they’re doing, have you seen that?

Ray Zinn: Yes, I have. It doesn’t happen often, but you don’t know what you don’t know. The clue or the key here is to know what you don’t know and take that into consideration. Sometimes you have to do something that you’ve never done before. I remember the story about this fellow who caught his arm. This is in southern Utah. He was hiking by himself, and he got his arm caught and he couldn’t get his arm out of that crevice. And so he tried for days to try to get his arm removed and nobody had rescued him yet. And so took his knife and he cut off his arm to save his life. He’s not a surgeon, but he had to do what he had to do to save his life.

Sometimes you have to do things that you don’t know or understand in order to preserve yourself or your organization.

Rob Artigo: Yeah.

Ray Zinn: So again, don’t be afraid to make a decision if you have to. If you don’t have to make a decision, then don’t. And wait until you have more knowledge or more information. So the key here is to make sure that you have to make the decision levers. I have to make the decision, and so therefore, I will use whatever knowledge and experience I have.

If you make a decision that you didn’t have to make because you’d lacked the experience or lacked the knowledge, that’s just stupidity again. That’s again, cutting off your arm to see if you’re a good surgeon. That wasn’t why he did that. He needed to save his life.

None of us have all knowledge and all experience. None of us have that. We all lack to some degree, some degree of knowledge and some degree of experience in all situations.

Rob Artigo: Guess it also is a matter of it coming down to being realistic about your knowledge base instead of being in denial about what you don’t know. If it’s something that you’re faced with, like the guy cutting off his arm, which is a move that is remarkable and its life-saving, but he was forced to do something that he didn’t know how to do.

I imagine that kind of situation, like you said, it does come up where you may have to do something that you don’t know how to do. But if you recognize it and you have that, you go, “Okay, I don’t know how to do this.” I guess it’s kind of like you buy an IKEA desk and you bring it home and you go to put it together and you look at it and you go, “This is way more complex than I thought it would be. It might be a good idea to read the instructions instead of winging it,” right? So if you recognize that you’re limited in your ability to do that, then you’re halfway there. You’re halfway to finishing.

Ray Zinn: Well, the key again, Rob, is to recognize what your decision is and what the consequence is of that decision. If the decision is critical, like you either cut off your arm or you die and you decide you’d rather live, then even though you don’t have a surgeon around and you hope your knife is sharp enough, you just have to act on what you have. And so recognizing your limitations in a decision is key. Not letting your ego get in the way of your decision making.

Whenever your ego gets in the way of your decision making, I can promise you it’s going to be a bad outcome. Recognize when your ego is involved, recognize when you lack that experience and that knowledge, and then act accordingly like this fellow did. He said, “I’m not a surgeon and I can’t find one right now. I can’t go into the local hospital and have my arm removed. I’m going to have to take matters in my own hands.” And without that knowledge of a surgery, he had to sever his arm.

Now, would’ve been done as good as if a surgeon had done it? Probably not, but he saved his life. And so you’re at the mercy of your ego. If your ego gets in the way of your decision-making process, I guarantee you you’re not going to have a good outcome.

Rob Artigo: Yeah, what it says here about the expert … So if you do have somebody who’s an expert in the area, it says that they tend to have greater meta-cognition, meaning that they know what they don’t know and are aware of their knowledge gaps. When they’re faced with a situation, they are automatically prepared to be upfront about it. And I think that one of the pieces of advice that you’ve had about making creative teams more successful is to say that you should admit this to your teammates so that they know.

Ray Zinn: Yeah. As I said, every time your ego gets in the way, you’re going to have a bad outcome. And so the best decision makers are the ones who understand their limitations, understand their lack of cognitive ability, experience, whatever. Those are the ones that make the best decisions.

And so having lived on this earth a few decades, I’ve seen both. I’ve seen whenever a person who has that cognitive ability to understand what he doesn’t know and the limitations, and he seeks the help, and he seeks that knowledge that he doesn’t have, they make the best decisions. And it’s those individuals whose egos get in the way of their decision-making process, and those are the ones that usually have a bad outcome.

Rob Artigo: Ray, our listeners can reach out to you at toughthingsfirst.com if they have any questions or comments. Obviously they can do that. They can also rate the podcast on their favorite platform. Keep the motivated listeners out there coming back to us on a regular basis and keep growing the podcast. At the website, toughthingsfirst.com. Podcasts, blogs, links to information about Ray’s books. Tough Things First, the Zen of Zinn series, which is one, two, and three, and the upcoming The Essential Leader by Ray Zinn.

Thanks, Ray.

Ray Zinn: Thank you.