The Confidence Bubble

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Certainty can be a dangerous mindset for approaching any situation. Nothing creates more errors and, importantly, an unwillingness to correct errors than a Certainty Mindset. When you just know you are right, it should send shivers down your spine.

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The title on my business card says Chief Customer Officer, I am responsible for managing the relationships between my company and our existing clients. To do the job effectively, I must be an advocate for my company with our clients and an advocate for the clients within our company. I know I’m doing the job well when both sides believe I’m a little biased in favor of the other side. My customers should feel like I’m constantly advocating on behalf of my company to drive value for the customer, and my company should believe I’m advocating so diligently on behalf of the customer and their needs that my loyalties may lie with them.

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Another key to doing the job is avoiding the feeling of Certainty creeping in on any forecast or prediction. I absolutely expect the course of action we are suggesting to succeed, but I am not certain. In fact, we spend lots of time in Pre-Mortem discussions where we imagine ourselves a year later with our current initiative on the table having failed. That discussion is about why it failed. We use that discussion to expose the weaknesses and fallacies in our current line of thinking. This does not ensure success, but it goes a long way in defeating the overconfidence that leads to a Certainty Mindset.

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An interesting thing is that a novice is naturally less likely to be overconfident. This creates a literal advantage to inexperience because a novice is more likely to measure twice and cut once. This isn’t to say that experience is a bad thing. As you might expect, experts are better than novices in almost every measurable category in every field, hence the term expert. However, there is a point on the spectrum where experience makes you worse than a novice.

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The Killing Zone

The "Killing Zone" is a term used in aviation to describe a period during a pilot’s career when they are most at risk of having an accident. This term is often associated with pilots who have accumulated between 50 and 350 hours of flight experience. During this phase, pilots have enough knowledge to feel confident but may lack the experience to handle unexpected situations effectively, leading to increased risk.

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?Surgical Errors

In the medical field, particularly for surgeons, there is a similar period early in their careers when they are more prone to making mistakes. This typically occurs between their 15th and 30th surgeries. Like pilots, these surgeons often feel confident in their abilities after their rigorous training. However, their lack of extensive hands-on experience in managing surgical complications can lead to errors.

Of special note in these examples is that a pilot with less than 50 hours of training is less likely to make a tactical error than a pilot with over 50 hours of training but less than 350 hours. For pilots at around 50 hours, there is a space where Confidence outpaces Competence. In other words, you start to feel confident in your skills because of your early success/training, which leads you to believe that you are more competent than you really are.

There is no worse teacher in life than early success because it can convince you that you are competent in a field where you have merely achieved anomalous success. Ask any experienced golfer what happened the next time out after they had putted extremely well during a round and declared that now it was time to exclusively work on other parts of their game.

This article is not meant to sap you of your confidence. It is meant to ensure that your confidence has not outpaced your competence. If you fear that you are in the confidence bubble, then go through the Pre-Mortem exercise I detailed above. Remember, in this exercise, your strategy/relationship/idea has failed, and your goal is to figure out why it failed. This isn’t negative thinking. This is the kind of exercise that is going to lower your failure percentage over time.

The next time you realize that you are going into a situation where you are Certain about the outcome, just know you might be resting comfortably in the killing zone of your very own Confidence Bubble.