Editor’s introduction
The Dunning–Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which individuals with low ability or knowledge in a given domain significantly overestimate their own competence, while those with higher expertise tend to underestimate theirs. First identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect arises because the skills required to perform well are often the same skills needed to evaluate performance accurately—meaning the least capable are also the least aware of their shortcomings. As a result, confidence and competence can be inversely related, particularly at lower levels of ability, creating a paradox in which the most certain voices are often the least reliable.
Charlotte Kok does not merely exhibit the Dunning–Kruger effect—she operationalises it. Her certainty is not the product of mastery, but the absence of it; lacking the insight required to recognise her own limitations, she mistakes authority for competence and confidence for correctness. In her world, dissent is not data but disloyalty, and failure is not feedback but insubordination. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: the less she understands, the more assured she becomes; the more assured she becomes, the less she listens. And so Charlotte rises—not despite her ignorance, but partly because she is unaware of it. Like those around her.
Take for example, David Munday, who put Charlotte in her current position. Our intrepid journalist recounts his interview with the smitten tenacious Managing Partner, Audit.
Journalist: So tell me, David, how you filled the role of Client Success Executive?
David Munday: After an extensive campaign, months of searching and interviews, stakeholder consultation and strategic reflection, we settled on Charlotte Kok from the Public Sector Network (PSN). A General Manager, no less.
J: Impressive title. What relevant bids and tenders experience did she bring?
DM: Experience is such a narrow way of looking at leadership.
J: I see.
DM: Charlotte brought something far more valuable: presence.
J: Presence?
DM: Executive presence. Gravitas. Confidence. The ability to enter a room and make people immediately feel they are either in very safe hands… or in considerable danger. Usually both.
J: But had she actually managed complex tender responses before?
DM: She had attended many events at which tenders were discussed.
J: That seems… adjacent.
DM: Leadership is adjacency.
J: Former staff have described her as, and I quote, “a glorified wedding planner with a persecution complex.”
DM: And Charlotte would describe them as the strategically under-victorious: losers always attack brilliance. I would not dignify the remarks of former employees who lacked the resilience to thrive under exemplary leadership.
J: They also said she delegated everything technical while taking personal credit for every success.
DM: Exactly. Strategic oversight.
J: And when things failed?
DM: Accountability culture.
J: Meaning?
DM: They were held accountable.
J: Not Charlotte?
DM: Charlotte was showing leadership. You’re clutching at straws.
Editor’s Note
There is, in corporate life, a peculiar romance reserved for confidence.
Not competence, of course—that is often technical, inconvenient, and occasionally abrasive. Competence asks difficult questions, notices contradictions, and has the regrettable habit of requiring evidence. Confidence, by contrast, is effortless. It arrives well dressed, speaks in complete sentences, and never suffers the indignity of self-doubt.
To the untrained executive eye, the two can appear identical.
And so men like David Munday do not hire capability so much as they fall in love with the performance of it. A firm handshake becomes strategic vision. A polished LinkedIn profile becomes leadership. The ability to speak at length without meaningfully answering a question becomes executive maturity.
One does not need to understand bids and tenders, after all, if one can stand near them confidently enough.
This is, perhaps, the purest expression of the Dunning–Kruger effect in management: not merely the incompetent overestimating themselves, but the equally incompetent promoting them for it.
The former employee called Charlotte Kok a “glorified wedding planner.”
This may be unfair.
Weddings, at least, require planning.
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