You can’t tell if you’re suffering from “unconscious incompetence” since, as Justin Kruger and David Dunning put it in their article of the same name, those who are unskilled are often unaware of it. Moreover, the less skilled you are, the worse you are at assessing the skills of yourself and others. Success or failure tends to come as a surprise, and what little feedback you receive is an abrupt shock to your self-assessment instead of a support mechanism to help you improve.

Your self-assessment is only relative to the abilities you used to have, and will always lack objectivity. The teams you work with can easily skew your sense of your own competence. Being on an above-average team can either make you feel like a superstar when you’re really more of a backup singer, or destroy your self-confidence when everybody seems so much more competent than you. On the other hand, a below-average team can make you feel complacently smug. Even if you use Reflect as You Work, it will only help you analyze the past rather than inform you about the present.

Create mechanisms for regularly gathering more or less objective external data about your performance. By soliciting feedback early, often, and effectively, you increase the probability that you will at least be conscious of your incompetence.

There are a variety of mechanisms available for acquiring feedback. At one level these include using techniques like test-driven development or dynamically type-checked languages with interactive interpreters to cause your programs to fail fast. At another level you may acquire feedback by getting your code reviewed or by pair programming. Exams and certifications can also be useful metrics for gauging your ability compared to others, although these often test only your exam-taking technique rather than your skill. Another way of gaining feedback is to ask people how they think you are doing; for example, contact people who interview you for a new job or promotion and ask them their opinion of you. Even if you didn’t get the job, you can gain a lot from being told precisely why you were turned down. Sometimes this feedback will reveal facets (both positive and negative) of your personality that you were unaware of.

All of the mechanisms described above will be useless if you haven’t developed the ability to process the raw data. For instance, if your employer provides annual reviews, you have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to get to the useful feedback. Criticism on its own is seldom useful feedback because it doesn’t tell you what is expected of you. Other kinds of bad feedback include feedback that is more about the other person than you (e.g., “Do this because I did it when I was your age”), that is really disguised advice, or that is what Dave Winer calls “stop energy.”^[36] This usually manifests itself as well-meaning advice telling you why you can’t achieve your goals and should give up immediately rather than risking failure.

So what does useful feedback look like? Useful feedback is data that can be acted upon and that gives you the option of doing more or less of a certain behavior. If you can’t do anything about it, then it’s not useful feedback. Or at least it’s not useful today. If your circumstances change it may suddenly become highly relevant. Try to keep in mind the advice that “if you count something interesting, you will learn something interesting” (Better, p. 255).

It’s also important to be aware of the distinction that systems thinkers make between reinforcing and balancing feedback. Reinforcing feedback encourages you to do more of something. Balancing feedback encourages you to do less of something. By combining the two types of feedback, a system can be kept relatively stable by making lots of small adjustments. Successful apprentices learn to create situations where they can quickly and frequently receive data about whether they need to do more or less of an activity. This often means learning to communicate your ideas and listening without interrupting.

Acquiring the ability to avoid defending your current level of knowledge in favor of paying careful attention to any feedback is one of the ways in which this pattern overlaps with The White Belt. Both patterns emphasize the idea that the apprentice should strive to become more teachable so that the pool of potential teachers expands.

Find something in your working environment that you can measure and, more importantly, affect. Track that metric for a while. As it changes, ask yourself what it’s telling you about your world. See if you can use it (and other metrics) to understand the effects of the changes you are making to your working environment.

Reflect As You Work and The White Belt.