[Note: the content of this essay has been included in a recently published book called The Crises of Expertise and Belief. This paperback book can be purchased by clicking on this link.]
Recently, the conservative essayist, Jeff Jacoby, wrote a brief piece entitled “Nobody knows anything.” (Jacobi, 2022). He was commenting on the often-failed prophecies made at the start of 2021 about the upcoming year. Many mistakes were made by the prophets, pundits and experts of 2021 – perhaps more than is usually the case when seeking to predict and plan for the immediate future.
Yet, as Jacobi notes, we can’t just reject what these people of wisdom and integrity suggest. We just need to be cautious – and the experts need to be modest:
Experts know a great deal, and to listen courteously when they speak is only prudent. But is not prudent to imagine that they see farther into the future than most people . . . [T]his year and every year, take their words with a healthy dose of skepticism. And don’t forget [a noteworthy] Axiom: “Nobody knows anything.”
In this issue of The Future of Coaching, we continue our exploration of the crisis of expertise that resides squarely in this axiom: “nobody knows anything.” We focus on “blind spots.” How do we as professional coaches help leaders overcome ignorance, hubris, blind-spots and become more self aware? In our recent published issue of The Future of Coaching that began our investigation of “the crisis of expertise”, we described the concept of leadership hubris or over-confidence. We also note that many people – not just leaders – are often blatantly ignorant and unaware of their lack of knowledge on specific subjects, while (sometimes) vehemently advocating that they know a lot
Dunning-Kruger Effect
This is described as the Dunning-Kruger effect where psychologist David Dunning (Dunning-Kruger Effect) notes “we are all stupid, it’s just that some of us are aware of how much we don’t know, and what makes us ignorant” and are therefore less likely to parade our ignorance”. So, there is a growing body of knowledge emerging from the field of psychology (Daniel Kahneman being one), that shows that most of us have little or no idea about why we behave the way we do – why we make decisions the way we do – and my earlier essay describes some of these findings.
This phenomenon may not be a problem at the lay-person level, but it can be much more severe at the leadership level, say in business. How do we help our coaching client when they exhibit these blind-spots and how do you coach them on recognizing their own blind spots so they can be better leaders? Attendant questions are:
- In general, how common is leadership over-confidence in your experience?
- Or, is it more common for leaders to believe that because they are experts in one field, to think they are experts in other fields as well?
- Do you find that leaders that you work with are defensive when you identify blind spots they may have exhibited? How do you deal with that?
- What are some of the techniques you use to help leaders overcome blind spots?
Blind Spots and the Practice of Coaching
It is clear that we humans are influenced by a range of factors beyond our awareness. Beginning to understand these factors and implement techniques to become more aware of our thinking and decision-making, makes us smarter and reduces over-confidence, ignorance and poor decision-making. Given the resistance to these tools, leadership coaches and consultants are in a position to nudge their clients to apply these tools for better understanding and decision-making.
These observations lead to an important question: in what ways are coaching practices concerned with the “blind spots” of clients (especially not knowing what they don’t know) and how does a coach address the unwillingness of some clients to acknowledge areas where they need but do not have adequate knowledge? In general, we must then ask: how common are these blind-spots in society or in business settings? In the earlier essay on hubris and blind-spots, we describe an experience one of us had with a senior leader who was an industry expert in one field and seemed to assume that they were therefore an expert in other fields as well – and they were not, with disastrous results. Is this experience commonly found among professional coaches? What about the strategies to be engaged by the coach? How does one go about identifying possible blind-spots in an individual and helping the individual see this for themselves? What are some of the techniques that can be used to help leaders?
Content of this Issue
In continuing to address the challenges of expertise faced by contemporary leaders and their coaches, we first offer an essay written by one of us, as guest editor [KW], that concerns the disturbing fact that experts are fallible, and leaders are often mis-informed or in some cases blatantly ignorant on certain topics they may weigh in on. He writes about ways in which coaches can help leaders overcome ignorance, hubris, and blind spots while becoming more self-aware:
We next provide two sets of essays offered by the second editor [WB] that looks at the crisis of expertise (And blind spots) from several different vantage points.
Several of these essays were published previously in the Library of Professional Coaching. They concern important elements regarding the nature of expertise and the contemporary crisis associated with expertise.
One of these essays focuses on the diffusion of innovation and its implications for the practice of professional coaching:
The second of these essays concerns the nature of research and evidence (in this case, specifically evidence regarding the effectiveness of professional coaching):
We offer a second set of essays that are newly prepared for this issue of The Future of Coaching. Each of these essays is founded on a story or metaphor and most build on recent explorations by other authors of expertise and the current nature of knowledge.
The first essay is based on a classic metaphor offered many years ago by Plato as well as an observation of contemporary life made by a noted psychologist:
In Over Our Heads: Living and Learning in the Cave | Library of Professional Coaching
The second essay builds on a recent critique offered about the way in which 21st Century citizens are enamored with numbers:
The Cosmopolitan Expert: Dancing with Numbers and Narratives | Library of Professional Coaching
A third essay applies the analysis of six sub-cultures that operate in most organizations to the issue of expertise:
Coaching and Expertise in the Six Cultures | Library of Professional Coaching
A fourth essay is provided that returns to an opening comment in this introduction to Issue Twenty Eight of The Future of Coaching—a comment that we seem to know nothing or more precisely that we often do not know that we know nothing:
We finish with an interview one of us [KW] conducted with Bill Carrier, a professional coach who works mostly with upper-level leaders in organizations – and therefore offers a distinctive perspective on the crisis of expertise:
We hope that you find insight and perhaps some guidance in this issue of The Future of Coaching. We are living in times that are filled with experts—many of whom purport to know something. They might be right. But a little humility is called for. And we, as coaches and consultants must be just as humble in our attempt to be experts about expertise.
Kevin Weitz, Psy.D.
Guest Editor
William Bergquist, Ph.D.
Editor
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Reference
Jacoby, Jeff (2022) “Nobody Knows Anything,” Boston Globe, January 3, 2022, p. K7