The most confident voice in your change programme is rarely the best informed

Picture your next steering committee. Someone at the table is very sure of themselves. They have "been through one of these before", they know how long the change work really takes, and they are quietly trimming the timeline as they speak. Everyone nods, because seniority tends to carry weight.

Now look for the other person. The change practitioner asking for more time on embedding. The team leader querying the benefits case. The quiet subject matter expert who has barely spoken. They tend to sound hesitant... and they are often the ones who know the most.

That gap between confidence and competence has a name. David Dunning and Justin Kruger described it back in 1999: people with a narrow grasp of a domain tend to overestimate how much they understand it, while those with deep expertise, who can see the full shape of what they don't know, tend to underrate themselves. It is a very human pattern (none of us are exempt, and that is rather the point).

In a complex programme of work, the "calibration problem" gets expensive. A sponsor running a five-year-old restructure playbook on a transformation with completely different dynamics. A leader who watched a competitor stumble and decided they know exactly what went wrong, without ever sitting in the rooms where the problems actually lived. None of it is bad faith. They are generally working from a "reference class" that is too narrow, too old, or too far from the work in front of them.

And if you have watched the AI conversation lately, where absolute certainty and fairly limited experience keep combining in interesting ways... you have seen the effect in full flight.

The good news is that this is a leadership condition you can design around. One intervention we keep coming back to: make the work visible, in the room, together. Rather than a polished process map presented as a done deal, you get the people who actually do the work mapping it on a whiteboard while the people who think they understand it watch and ask clarifying questions. Confidence without calibration tends not to survive contact with something everyone in the room can see.

If you want a sounding board on where this is showing up in your own programme, that is exactly the kind of nuanced judgement we built Pragma to help with, and the FAQ explains how it works.

The deeper version of this argument, including the football story that makes it land, is in Mark's original piece: There's a risk in your change programme that rarely makes the risk register.