We often blame businesses, leaders, ourselves for “not knowing better.”
The reality is, in modern American, there is a healthy amount of conditioned incompetence. Yes, as a society, we really don’t know better, don’t know different. For a very long time, if ever, we have not had to deal with some of the incredibly complex issues at play now. For the most part our businesses, schools, health care, housing markets have been swept along in a 30 year string of mostly growth and expansion.
the last couple of generations literally do not know better. We have to develop new behaviors, new thinking, new ways of getting it done.
Below is the abstract from one of my favorite articles on incompetence and the inability of those with it to recognize it as such:
“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The
authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these
domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make
unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4
studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and
logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the
12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration
to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically,
improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them
recognize the limitations of their abilities. ”
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf