Confidently Incompetent / Ignorant
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that "the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." This is true whether one interprets "stupid" as foolish (short on smarts) or as ignorant (short on information). His sentiment echoes that of Charles Darwin, who pointed out: "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
Alan Bellows has posted a piece called Unskilled and Unaware of It on his blog Damn Interesting, about exactly this. In effect it is another blindspot, and one that arises all too often in strategy discussions, performance appraisals and many other facets of the life of a firm.
Alan describes research that was done in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University that discovered (or, perhaps more accurately, confirmed) :
1)Incompetent individuals often dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
2)Incompetent individuals often suffer from deficient metacognitive skills that makes them less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it - be it their own or anyone else's.
3)Because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent people are often unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
4)The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.
5)Top-performers tended to under-estimate their own performance compared to their peers. The researchers called this the false-consensus effect, where a person assumes that one's peers are performing at least as well as oneself when given no evidence to the contrary.
This suggests that often, the people that are confidently proclaiming a view may be doing so from a position of ignorance and incompetence in the particular topic under discussion, while the person that is less confident in taking a position is really the person that is worth listening to.
It also suggests that performance evaluation systems that depend on self-assessment in the absence of hard, objective data, are fatally flawed.
Obviously not all confidence is misplaced; sometimes it is derived from accurate self-assessment of one's competence and skill. But the strategist needs to be able to determine when this is the case, and when not. I believe that there are four things that he or she can do, to avoid this pitfall:
1)Start the process (right up front) with a discussions about all the blindspots that can arise, including this one, and agree ground rules about how they are to be avoided.
2)Make sure that everybody that is likely to have information that needs to be considered, participates in the process.
3)Don't allow the "over-confident" (and therefore, by definition in this research, the probably incompetent or ignorant) to dominate the process by "pushing" her or his ideas above others presented less confidently.
4)Make sure that wherever possible, subjective opinions are backed up by hard evidence.
This can be a sensitive issue if those exhibiting the overconfidence are senior "power" people in the firm. Challenging them (let alone even suggesting that they may be ignorant or incompetent) can be very difficult. The issue cannot be avoided, though. Tolerating it makes it almost certain that at least part of the resulting strategy will be based on faulty assumptions or other information.