The Illusion of Simplicity: Underestimating expertise.

When someone is good at what they do, from the outside it appears as a smooth ride. They do it so well and all the rough edges have been worked out by experience. There is no friction to grab our attention.

A fellow expert sees this and appreciates that this is the refined result of much time devoted to honing their craft. But another person – one who has less experience in the observed realm – might look at the exact same process and mistake it as simple.

As such, mastery can sometimes quietly slip under the radar; the illustion of simplicity belying the careful hand presenting sushi, creating art, or managing people.

We explored the Dunning-Kruger effect in our last article, unpacking the idea that people with the least competence often have the highest confidence in their abilities. But the other side of overestimating your own inexperienced ability, is to underestimate other peoples’ skill.

Rolling sushi, for example, is easy…until we actually try it. When we fumble our first attempts, we typically are humbled pretty quickly and come to respect the skill of a sushi chef – care for ingredients and years of learning to present a simple roll, just so. Unfortunately however, as we get older we don’t throw ourselves into new things as often and so many times we never learn the hard way like this and undervalue other people’s talents more than they deserve.

The illusion of simplicity is a cognitive bias where people underestimate the complexity of a task or situation by focusing only on the most visible aspects – neglecting underlying complexity or nuance. This bias leads us to oversimplify complex problems, resulting in incorrect assumptions and flawed decisions.

“Sure,” you might agree, “I can totally think of examples of where other people have underestimated my talents like this. But I am the exception and don’t make that same mistake.”

Not quite! We are all susceptible to this line of thinking because by its nature, it is a blind spot – which, by its definition, is blind. Assuming otherwise leads to a resistance to learning and dismissal of feedback – a place devoid of growth and fertile for conflict.

Let’s consider a workplace example:

A marketing team is tasked with redesigning the company’s website. The project manager, Alex, has some basic knowledge of web design from watching tutorials and attending a weekend workshop. When the company’s experienced web designer, Maya, presents a comprehensive plan that includes user experience research, accessibility considerations, and technical requirements, Alex dismisses many of her recommendations as “unnecessarily complex.”

When Maya attempts to explain why certain technical considerations are critical for discoverability and user engagement, Alex interrupts with, “Let’s not overcomplicate things. We can just use a template and be done in half the time.”

In his rookie mindset, Alex is unable to recognize expertise and believes website design is relatively straightforward based on his limited exposure. He fails to appreciate Maya’s years of specialized knowledge and the complexity underlying the creation of an effective website. He sees only the visible end product without understanding the expertise required to make it function properly and serve business goals – simple in its form, sure, but not because it is simple.

The consequences become evident when the rushed website launches with poor mobile responsiveness, slow loading times, and accessibility issues that alienate customers and harm the company’s reputation.

Whoops – it turns out that when the invisible requisite steps to get to an end goal are missed, we end up somewhere both unexpected and undesired.

There is a risk that comes with not acknowledging the illusion of simplicity. We can try our best, but sometimes we inadvertently overlook the expertise of others which leads to…issues. Beyond websites, this underestimating of others can extend into any of our relationships and breed conflict. What if Alex had responded differently to Maya’s suggestions?

While confict is natural, it’s important to recognize our blind spots and engage with them curiously rather than with defensiveness. This is reason #107 that we recommend everyone enrols in our FREE Conflict 101 webinar. Deepen your education with our specific on-demand program for Dealing with Defensiveness.

We can demystify conflict with a psychological approach, and seeing through the illusion of simplicity is just one of the many opportunities to do so.