I did the Cousera’s course Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects. It was a pleasant course with many useful information and a lot of useful techniques to speed up my learning ability. One point that caught my attention was the Illusion of Competence bias and I would like to share with you how I added this knowledge to my day.
Our brain can fool us in many ways. When someone explains a subject and we could follow the explanation, we believe that we understood it. Furthermore, we think that we are able to work with this new information. But we are not‼️ To give you an example, think about learning how to ride a bicycle. The only way to actually learn it is by doing it. That’s why when our teachers at school explained a subject to us, they usually would give us exercises to practice that subject.
After doing the course I started paying attention to verify if I had some moments of Illusions of Competence in my day-to-day as a developer working in a team. And indeed, it happens a lot. I could observe that during a Project’s Inception my colleagues and I heard explanations a few times. But when we had to use what we just learned we normally would have a hard time making a good use of it. This is because we had an Illusion of Competence about the project/product.
After noticing that the Illusion of Competence was happening to me, actually us, I decide to fight against it. And here are three ways that I could adopt during my days to reduce the Illusion of Competence effects:
Asking questions
Explaining to a friend
Practicing
It is hard to focus on an explanation. Unless the subject is related to my hobbies, it will require effort to keep my mind focused on it. One way to keep focus my focus is to get involved in the explanation, been part of it. Asking a question is a good way to tell your brain that you are part of the explanation.
When someone explain anything it’s common to finish a topic saying:
Did you get it?
Did you understand?
OK?
And we are used to answer: “Yes”, “Uhum”. But that is how the Illusion of Competence is born. To avoid it when I receive a question like “Do you understand?” I like to answer with “Can I playback it back to you to validate my understanding?”
Explaining what I just heard is a great opportunity to find gaps or raise points that were not covered by previous explanation.
ℹ️ 🤵🏾♀️: Did you get it?
Another way to use this tool is to go back to my desk, draw my understanding and intentionally explain it to some. It doesn’t matter how complex a subject is, I must be able to draw my mental model and explain my understanding to someone in a couple of minutes. If the other person understands or were part of the session where I heard the information, we can then compare our understandings.
ℹ️ 👦🏾: Hey can I show you my understanding of this product/project?
Practicing is essential to uncover the hidden unknows in our understanding about a given topic. But it is not easy to practice a new product/project. The real practice is actually to implement it, but thar normally takes months or quarters. What we can do is to implement some form of mock implementation. If the project is UI heavy an easy way is to use pen and paper to validate the behaviour of the UI.
📖 When I was helping Adatree to be created I had to implement the frontend to manage consent while the rest of the team was working on the complex backend components. Since it was all new and the backend was orders of magnitude more complex than the frontend, I have implemented the frontend with mock implementations of the backend services. My frontend components would call a “service layer” and the implementation of the service layer was returning hardcoded values and/or using local storage to keep state. Once the backend started to get some form of shape, I started replacing the services with real implementation
When the project is data intensive it is possible to use spreadsheets to simulate part of the behaviour as well:
📖 Back in 2010, I was part of a project to launch an American clothing brand into Europe. A major part of the project was to support VAT (Value Adde Tax) to the price calculation:
This is one of those concepts that at first sight doesn’t seen to be related to software development, but once you understand how it impacts your daily activities you realise that a little understanding about it can be a huge help.
I highly recommend the Coursera training. It is free and was way worth my time there.