The confidence that comes before competence

I have taken part in dozens of big programs, the kind that break into many subprojects. And the scene almost always starts the same way. Someone does a shallow study, looks at a huge problem from above, and sets a short deadline. They don't see the gaps. They don't see the risks. They don't see what would need to be ready, defined, and agreed before starting. They propose doing something they have never done, in a huge volume of business. And if it goes wrong, the damage is big.

I was once that person. I started without knowing, I took risks, I owned my failures. Back then the business could take it, and the size could take it too. Those are the advantages of starting small and going up floor by floor, using the stairs, without an elevator. Today it is not like that anymore. In the last ten years, the tolerance of the market we are in, of the client, and of the business itself has dropped a lot. The lab where I learned by making mistakes slowly closed.

The name for this

There is a name for the first scene. Dunning–Kruger. The meeting-room version is simple: the person knows enough to have an opinion, but not enough to know that the opinion is weak.

Someone who understands little about a topic also lacks the background to measure how much they understand. So confidence comes early, before competence. The confident layperson closes the subject in thirty seconds. The person who really understands starts slowly. They say "it depends". They ask what the assumption is. They look for the exception. They seem slower. And they cost less in the end.

There is a detector that never fails. It is the word "just". We just need to add AI. We just need to move to the cloud. We just need to change the system. We just need to connect through an API. Every time I hear "just", I know I am facing someone who does not see the invisible layers of the scope. And they do not see them because they do not know them. Nobody sees what they don't know.

What happens over time

Confidence rises fast at the start. Then it falls. The person studies more, hits the real complexity, and realizes they knew less than they thought. This is the bottom, the point where humility arrives. With practice, mistakes, and feedback, competence really grows, and confidence comes back. But it comes back different. It is no longer arrogance. It is confidence with a base under it.

The mature expert does not say "I am absolutely sure". They say "with these assumptions, the most likely path is this one, and these are the risks". At the end of the curve the person knows more, trusts more, and doubts better.

There is a trap here. People who get no feedback, do not study, and are not challenged by reality stay stuck at the early peak. That is not a learning curve. It is recycled conviction.

The problem that changed

You cross the bottom of the curve by making mistakes. It is the mistake with feedback that calibrates confidence. That was always the mechanism. But that is exactly what became expensive. Tolerance for failure has shrunk, and the place where people learned by falling has disappeared. The curve still asks for the same laps. The cost of each lap went up.

This is the point where my role changed. It stopped being only about raising awareness. It became something else, more specific: making the team feel the bottom of the curve without letting the business pay the bill.

I have been trying to anticipate the fall on paper, so it does not happen in the market.

The questions I have been asking in meetings serve that purpose. What is the assumption. What is the exception. What reduces this risk before we execute. Each of these questions brings down a bit of the shallow confidence, in a cheap place: a meeting room, a pre-mortem. The fall happens there, and not in a project that is already running with the client taking part.

My job is not to give the answer, even if sometimes I make that mistake. It is to widen the person's field of view until they start saying "it depends" on their own. The sign that it worked is not the team agreeing with me. It is the team starting to ask the hard questions by themselves, before I arrive.

And there is one care that I take seriously. Calibrated confidence and paralysis look very much alike from the outside. If I fill someone with risks and exceptions without also giving them a frame to decide, I push the person from too much confidence straight into the fear of deciding. They freeze instead of moving forward. That is why I try to make it clear that there is almost never a right and a wrong. There are paths with pros and cons. The goal is not to remove the risk. It is to choose, with open eyes, which risk we accept and how to reduce it.

What stays

In the end, what I have been doing is less about teaching content and more about shortening the distance. The distance between the naive peak and confidence with judgment. Without anyone needing to hit the bottom in front of the client, with the business already running.

It is hard, because I ask for two things that, at first, look like enemies. I ask the person to doubt and to act at the same time. To doubt enough not to underestimate the problem. To act enough not to freeze in front of it.

Growth is not going from ignorance to certainty. It is going from naive certainty to confidence with judgment. And my role, in every meeting, is to encourage the team to go deeper, learn fast, and face the challenge head on. Without letting the first fall be the only thing that teaches them.

And here is where I find myself: I have not mastered what I described above yet. I study and I watch myself while I do it, to make this position more professional and easier for the team to pick up. The irony does not escape me. I spent the whole text talking about the curve, and now it is me measuring how much I still need to grow on it. My confidence on this topic is lower today. I fell into my own bottom. But I keep going, asking myself more and searching more, without freezing — which is exactly what I ask others to do.