78 thoughts on “The Competency Fallacy: Everyone Wings It All the Time”

  1. I think that this question assumes that “just winging it” and “competency” are mutually exclusive in a way that they aren’t.

    It’s like the opening case from Blink, about the greek statue the Getty had, where it was passing the scientific tests but the people who had worked with similar statues all their careers still knew off the cuff that it was a forgery.

    Doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other skilled professions each have a range of competence within their ranks. Even the most competent and most skilled wing it a lot. But — and this is important — their winging it isn’t the same as your winging it. Being able to wing it and have it work far more often than not is part of what competence is.Report

    1. Yes, this. Sooooo much this.

      I’ve told people for years that the only business book I recommend is Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner. I reread it every 5 years or so. Actually it might be about time for another reread.Report

  2. To be able to wing it, one must plan for all options ahead of time. At least plan a few moves into the future. Otherwise, you’ll just freeze up.

    On TV? It’s a bit of the survival of the fittest, just like in real life. Either you chose a job where you need to wing it, frequently — in which case you don’t survive if you’re not good, or you choose to be lazy.Report

  3. I frequently meet classical musicians at jazz gigs. Absolute monster musicians, some of the finest in the world. But they’ll often look and listen in wonder, and say, “I wish I could do that,” of the improvisers on the stage, winging it. They recognize that that the skills required to perform and compose in the moment — the ability to wing it — requires years of study and practice; it’s not casual or occasional.

    So I very much agree with @tod-kelly comment above.

    Just because someone wings it, does not mean that they’re producing less valuable work; and often indicates that they’re at the top of their form.Report

    1. Oh yeah baby, meet my expectations. You know it’s adequately-sized for the job.

      Sex me enough to accomplish standard release, then we’ll get a full 8 hours of sleep before work in the morning.Report

  5. “CIS” shows…..the typo slayeth even the competent.

    What to many people get from shows, books, movies, etc is that everything has a purpose in a story. They don’t see people getting really lucky or making a mistake that just works out or succeeding despite what they do. So when they look at real life and history they assume all good moves lead to good things or that everything must have been planned.Report

    1. I’m reading a very silly book in the Thursday Next series at the moment, and there’s a section where the protagonist prepares to enter the Real World from Book World – one of the adjustments she has to make is to the absence of a coherent narrative – for instance most of the conversations one has in the Real World don’t actually produce any useful insight or motivate anyone’s next action in a purposeful way.Report

    1. not so much. The problem with central planning wasn’t that it assumed perfect competence or that it couldn’t wing it. The problem was that it assumed winging it was a universal geographic and situational constant. And it was executed as another economic corruption. But I digress.Report

  7. Shogun is a great book, but competency-porn is a perfect label for it. When I reached the end, I was irritated by the conclusion that the one character (the winning samurai, not the western hero) had actually had everything well in hand, that everything worked out according to his plan, even when events seemed to be going against him. The whole series of events was too sprawling and distributed for that to have been remotely possible.

    And what’s sad in all this competency porn is that it’s a bit boring and predictable really (hence easy to write, which is surely why we get so much of it). More interesting by far is watching characters scrambling to adjust when plans go awry, when the unexpected happens, when the other side actually makes a better strategic choice and the hero needs to adjust or lose.Report

    1. Torinaga was based at on Tokugawa Ieyasu and Tokugawas Ieyasu was probably one of the most competent people in Japanese history. That man was not only a master politician but a great social engineer as well. He improvised a lot in real life and a lot of his cunning had to do with not wanting to lose his skin at a dangerous time in Japanese history.Report

  8. “What would happen if we basically all admitted the headline and that we are all essentially winging it and just trying to make sense of the random chaos that is life?”

    I suspect it would lead to different norms, values and institutions. Better ones, IMO. More emphasis on experimentation.Report

    1. An example that comes to mind is marketing. When I transferred into marketing late in my career I was shocked at how marketers have no frickin clue what sells. The best approaches are to try lots of things, measure, reform, re measure… Etc etc etc.

      When talking to other departments they need to feign expertise and confidence. But the real expertise is learning to know that they don’t know much.Report

      2. Right. This is exactly the same in software. People who strive for predictable outcomes end up with garbage, way off schedule and broken. On the other hand, folks who approach the topic flexibly do much better, even if they cannot quite explain how.Report

      3. v,
        A talented designer builds flexibility and growth in from the ground up.
        (I like python — it recognizes that it’s not the tool for everything, so
        when you outgrow it, you can write python methods in C(++)… makes an elegant layered solution)Report

  9. I think that’s about right. One thing I learned during mergers with a few of our competitors that became a mantra of mine is, “Everybody is just as dysfunctional as you are.” When you’re at war with your big competitor and it feels like you’re hanging by a shoelace, all of your products are slapped together with duct tape, and you’re just one bad field test from losing the market, it’s really easy to see the competition as doing everything right, having good professional procedures, and being largely bug free.

    Then the mergers happen and we consolidate engineering teams and product lines. In every case, the company we thought was inches away from whuppin’ us had at least as many hidden issues, at least as a many holes in their procedures and testing, and at least as many engineers who were losing sleep waiting for something to fall apart. Every time you feel like you’re uniquely incompetent and dysfunctional, take heart. Everybody else is just like you.Report

    1. Every time you feel like you’re uniquely incompetent and dysfunctional, take heart. Everybody else is just like you.

      Except Samsung. Frickin’ Samsung. Those guys are higher forms of life.

      But seriously, probably Samsung too.Report

      3. Heck no. Their TV’s are great, but have you ever tried one of their appliances?

        My mother-in-law has a fridge of their’s that’s rusting. Why? The ice-maker dumps tiny shards of ice down into the innards of the steel door every time it’s used, where it melts and starts rusting it.

        Because their ice maker setup was just designed by an idiot. It’s not “bad seals” or “bad gaskets” or some other mechanical defect. It’s an artifact of the actual design.

        A friend of mine with one of their top-end washer/dryers is having similar problems (of the “this was designed badly”) type.Report

      5. I was thinking more on the electronics side. We were worried about Samsung getting into our business a while back (a handheld electronic device) and every similar Samsung product that might be adapted to enter our market was really well designed and manufactured when we dissected it. It was deeply disconcerting.Report

  10. Interestingly, I just read about thirty years’ worth of cognitive psychology on just this topic. Heuristics and biases, naturalistic decision-making, and some of the newer dualistic model stuff.

    In a nutshell, no, we’re not always winging it. In fact, there’s plenty of research to suggest that real predictive expertise exists, but it is task-dependent and problem-domain dependent. A lot of what we consider to be “expert” activity falls out of the task-dependent and problem-domain dependent arena and you wind up with descriptive expertise that lacks predictive capabilities. Sometimes you have problem domains that are large (medicine) that still lack task-dependency characteristics in some parts of the subdomain.

    Thus, on the one hand, you can have an economist who studies monetary policy for 40 years and still can’t tell you when a worldwide recession is going to hit, because macroeconomics is a problem domain that doesn’t have much predictability (the system is too complex)… and on the other, you can have an emergency room doctor who consistently outperforms everybody else in the ward in correctly identifying appropriate treatments during a triage event.

    And you can then have that same doctor fail spectacularly at trying to play House.

    This I probably should make into an upcoming Good Science post…Report

    1. you wind up with descriptive expertise that lacks predictive capabilities.

      Frickin’ seismologists still can’t tell us when the big one will hit!Report

      2. Yeah, and these idiot computer programmers *still* can’t tell me how long their programs will take to run. I mean, I’ve made it their number-one top-priority action item to put together a runtime estimator!Report

      1. @wardsmith

        That Cracked article is funny, but it’s actually pretty bad analysis.

        Germane to your comment… mostly (1), what James says below.

        Economists can indeed make predictions, and they can make accurate ones, but they’re not necessarily useful, and they’re in specific areas of economics.

        Like, say, “Within 50 years we will hit a period of recession” is a prediction that an economist can make with a reasonable degree of certainty. “Inflation will continue”.

        They just can’t beat a computer algorithm when it comes to predicting short term stock market trends (not that the computers are good at it, either). That’s because of the task characteristics, not because of the problem domain.

        Similarly, a climate scientist can make general predictions about the consequences of temperature increase, but they can’t make specific ones. “There will be more large storms” is a prediction, but “they will make landfall here and then” isn’t.

        Ward, I don’t know why you find it necessary to make most of your comments lately about climate change, but for someone who claims to be well read on the subject this comment reveals a pretty basic conflation error to be making.Report

    5. Ward, climate science is an actual physical hard science. Economics is mushy soft science. Big difference, but i guess you probably know that.Report

  11. I asked my friend who worked on the hill about how realistic “House of Cards” was.

    “I WISH PEOPLE THERE COULD GET SHIT DONE LIKE THAT!” was her response. Oh.

    I think @tod-kelly nails it in his first comment. I do think we’d be better served to have fairer expectations of other people (and I say this as someone whose major flaw is holding too high expectations for everyone). At the same time, I think there are areas where our expectations are too low. It often seems that the situations where we should have high expectations we have low ones and the ones where we have low expectations we have high ones.Report

    1. A bit less pithily, the term “winging it” implies a certain quick thinking flexibility that doesn’t adequately reflect any situation without clarity in the real world, whereas muddling through has a nice….I dunno, stumbling aspect that does.Report

  13. I think you have a good point Saul, and I think it speaks to the difficulty the media have portraying expertise (as Vikram has noted before this has an effect on how female characters are portrayed).

    I this is because of precisely how inexplicable expertise looks to someone who lacks it. A TV shows’ writers don’t understand how an expert at X figures out a problem in their domain, so they portray expert characters as making wild leaps of logic, and then make them look smart by having the plot back them up.

    Basically it’s like the reverse of Heterodyne’s Law – any sufficiently under-analysed science is indistinguishable from magic.Report

    2. Torchwood had some decent stuff about how to be competent:
      1) Get the experts on the line
      2) learn how to make do, and scavenge what you need.
      3) hope to hell you actually have enough stuff to make “magic” happenReport

  14. “Competency porn” is a perfect description of the works of Ayn Rand. And much of Heinlein.Report

      2. I knew a guy like that. He had this enormous CAD system he’d written entirely in x86 assembler, for speed. But it was HUGE. (And very fast.)

        Guy was definitely a mad genius.Report

      3. Geekiest programmers I ever knew were these dudes who maintained an essential auditing program when I worked for a state welfare dept.; the original code was gone. And they paid these dudes to maintain it because (of course) nobody knew what it did, but it was essential.

        One of the best things I ever did was quit programming. It was easy. And stressful. I’m much happier writing and knitting, though neither pays nearly as well. But it was worth it, nonetheless.Report

      5. @mike-schilling Yes he was.

        I was fresh out of an 18-week COBOL course; I’d previously been a first-person interpreter at a living museum, and could not do that work because I’d broken my jaw a few years earlier; I could not talk all day for a living. So I got retrained through a CETA grant.

        I don’t even remember his name, early 1980’s. But he taught me something really important: you don’t need to remember how to do something, you need to remember where to look it up. That always struck me as the essence of the digital age; we are all librarians now.Report

      6. Machine language, surely.

        I was always fond of writing something as a single line of APL that couldn’t be evaluated because by the time you reached the middle, the data structure it represented ran to terabytes. Even if you had access to an interpreter that did a fairly decent job on lazy evaluation.Report

      8. Real Programmers get “delivered” to their worksite in a black helicopter. And blindfolded. [and that’s what you get for being a “trusted contractor”… I suppose they knock you unconscious otherwise.]Report

  15. How much do you think fictional media makes us think politicians, scientists, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals are competent than they really are?

    Well, to my knowledge, there aren’t a lot of shows that feature the suave, debonaire, and handsome historian who goes about solving problems. But if there were, they’d probably be along the lines of the old t.v. show “Voyagers” (remember that? from the 80s?), or perhaps the plot would have the historian settle bar fights about whether the CSA would have won the war if Chamberlain had been a bit slower in defending Little Round Top.Report

  16. I think that there are plenty of shows that defeat the competency porn myth in my own profession. Law & Order does a very good job of cops and lawyers trying hard and mostly in good faith, sometimes coming up short or having to adapt to clever counter-moves by adversaries. The guys on Boston Legal were clearly making it all up as they went along and no doubt incapable of master planning ordering a pizza. That made it fun. This is possible because writers were recruited who swam in those seas themselves.

    Less so with professions that involve actual science. My wife watches ‘Bones” sometimes, and its attempts to show forensic pathology as a falliable human endeavor are dripping with competency porn, particularly when the protagonist gets involved. (And the artificially quirky personalities of the scientists don’t help; about all that does help is how stunningly attractive Emily Deschanel is.)

    One result of this that we see in the courtroom is called the CSI Effect: jurors demand more of science than it can reasonably deliver.Report

    1. I’m pretty sure I was once booted from a jury because I have a job as an engineer. The prosecutor told me, “You’re probably used to having questions with black and white answers and not a lot of grey, right?” and evidently didn’t believe me when I said, “Not usually; there’s a lot open to intepretation in what I do.”

      Which is too bad; I’ve always wanted to serve on a jury, but never have. (I have a fantasy of being Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. Justice Porn, I guess.)

      (Also, I do know that if I ever do serve on a jury, most likely it will be for a case like the one I was booted from- two guys who are probably not very nice guys, both with criminal histories, get into a fight and one is accused of assaulting the other. He said/ He said; sort it out, and good luck on figuring out the “truth”.)Report

      1. ginger,
        that just means that the guy who struck you thought he wanted to pull on yer heartstrings, and that the other guy had evidence that he was struck first.

        I did serve on a civil jury, and we spent most of the court time discussing $2,000 (we wound up awarding over $100K in damages alone, so…)Report

  18. Not only is it the competency porn, but there’s also the fact that if they actually portrayed reality we’d be simultaneously bored and incredulous. No fiction writer would make up a situation where Congress passed a law that nearly put Goodwill out of business by accident, even though that actually happened. No fiction writer would make up a situation where taking a Federal grant would actually cost money, even though that happens all the time.Report

      3. This actually was huge on NPR at the time of its passage.

        From the wikipedia: “The problem is not the lead or phthalate content, as they imply, but the fact that the products must be tested to make sure they comply.”

        What this means is that the old man who carves ducks to be pulled with a string can’t sell his ducks because he hasn’t tested his ducks for phthalates. The ducks are made of wood. The string is made of string. There ain’t no phthalates to be found but this has not been *PROVEN* through testing. Even though it’s wood and string.

        The article also mentions this:

        In early 2009, local media reported that children’s clothes, books, toys, and other items were being removed from shelves at local stores – and in some of these cases even to the point of causing the entire store to close – in Wichita, Kansas,[22] Ionia, Michigan,[23] Conway, Arkansas,[24] Goldsboro, North Carolina,[25] Lincoln, Nebraska,[26] New York City, New York (NYC),[27] Rochester, New York,[28] Marshall, Minnesota,[29] Kailua, Hawaii,[30] New Port Richey, Florida,[31] and Tucson, Arizona.[32]

        One of those citations takes you here:

        http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm?Id=0,80479

        (2nd paragraph from the article)
        The new law was passed in August after several toys were recalled because they contained lead. The law only affects products that are made for children 12 years old or younger. Store owners could face up to a 100 thousand dollar fine for every violation. That’s why Goodwill stores are now busy pulling children’s toys and clothes off the shelves. Report

      4. Oh, I assumed the CPSIA issue was something like that, but how would that almost put them out of business? Money from their used goods stores is actually a tiny fraction of their revenue. Most of it comes from grants, fed subsidies, donations and membership subscriptions.

        The stores are actually a way to spend money (it employes vulnerable populations), not make money.Report

      5. All that to say: the companies like Hasbro loved this law because they have the infrastructure that can absorb testing everything. The old man who carves ducks out of wood? He doesn’t.

        So “Ants In The Pants” can get tested and, having been tested, can be legally sold. The ducks cannot be legally sold.

        To bring us around to Goodwill, let’s say that you donate a wood duck that you bought from an old man. “The kids haven’t played with this since forever. I’m getting rid of it. I’ll donate it! TO GOODWILL!!!!!”

        Well, Goodwill knows that if they sell it, they could potentially be fined $100,000. So they’ll just burn the duck.

        Saying that the law could have forced Goodwill out of business may be a hair of an overstatement, but it’s well within acceptable boundaries for overstatement in the comments here, I reckon.Report

      8. “Money from their used goods stores is actually a tiny fraction of their revenue.”

        Right, because when you say “Goodwill” to people, they think about grants and subsidies and member subscription fees, and they hardly *ever* think about stores that sell used goods :rolleyes:Report

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