The Sinking Rowboat Dilemma, or How The Competent Keep The Incompetent Incompetent
On a sunny spring day, two people are sitting on a small wooden row boat, on a pristine lake. You are one of them, the other one is a person you don’t know; it’s just someone who was willing to share the ride with you in this rental rowboat—boats are in high demand that particular day because of the lovely weather. As you row the boat deeper into the lake, you notice it has a leak, and not a small one, so water starts to come in quickly and threatens to sink the boat. There happens to be one plastic basin aboard. Your occasional partner takes the initiative and—to your horror—starts to use it the wrong way: this is, using the convex side, kind of trying to “shoo” the water out instead of scooping it as any reasonable person would do. What an absolute knob, you think. An idiot is not exactly what you need at this point. You are inflamed by the fact that, from all halfwits on the loose in the whole damn country, you had to find the worst one, someone you didn’t even choose. One part of you thinks: this guy deserves to go down to learn a lesson, so you sit and rejoice with a smirk on your face—muehehe. Quickly you realize, well damn, his demise is your demise. And you’re too young and beautiful to die. Just as you remember this lake is known for its diverse ecosystem of alligators and eels, self-preservation over trying to lecture some John Doe prevails—this is not Reddit after all—so you take the bowl from his hands and start bailing water the proper way. You scoop like there is no tomorrow, the small rowboat manages to stay afloat, and luckily a gentle wind takes you safely to the shore. Close call.
Back on the ground, as you drive back home, and while you promise to yourself to never leave your couch on a Sunday ever again, you try to reflect on what just happened. How come he didn’t know how to bail water? Then, you think, maybe he had never seen a plastic washbowl in his entire life before, let alone a boat sinking. After all, using a washbowl to save a boat from sinking requires coming around some functional fixedness. A bit more zen, you contemplate that every human being is an ignorant human being. We all ignore, simply because we just can’t know everything, right? He was just ignorant or, more accurately, inexperienced.
You also ponder that he might have learned a lesson back there, and that he'll be better equipped should he find himself on a sinking boat with a random person again. But, you wonder, what kind of lesson has he learned after all? To step in and take the bull by the horns in the face of difficulty, or to wait for someone else to handle the problem for him instead? The key lies in an eventual second happening of this story, and this is a critical fork which marks the diversion from inexperience into either competence or incompetence.
Picture this same John Doe again on a sinking boat and the other boat passenger—once more—does the job for him. Now it’s all crystal clear: when things get ugly, stand still, others will come to save your ass. The inexperienced has now comfortably transitioned to an incompetent. The beauty of this is that he might not be aware of his incompetence. On the contrary, he might think this is the way because “the right people for the right job”. Argentinian cartoonist and writer Roberto Fontanarrosa wrote:
El perro es perro y no lo sabe. (The dog is a dog and it’s not aware of it)
One inexperienced individual coming across two consecutive competent people might be enough to ignite a life of oblivious incompetence. And more than two makes the incompetent increasingly, addictively more incompetent. Because competent individuals’ lives depend on staying afloat on a boat they share with the incompetent, the former will continue spontaneously enforcing this feedback loop by bailing water for the latter. A true dilemma: by helping them, the competent make them more incompetent. By not helping them, the competent are digging their own grave underwater.
But what if our hypothetical John Doe, the serial boat sinker, found himself with another incompetent fellow sailor this time? Clearly they would soon be a snack for the alligators. The incompetent, regardless the number, do not survive long in the wild.
Someone may read from this that it pays off to be incompetent and enjoy life while the capable sort things out for them. Not really. Being incompetent is a powerless, small life. By being incompetent, you are destined to depend on others in ways you may even not intellectually be able to realize. But, this should not read either as the incompetent being helpless, intellectually challenged people incapable of doing anything to change their situation because they are incapable of noticing it in the first place. That might hold true if they worked in total isolation. But incompetence tends to glow brightly under the phosphorescent light of nearby competence. Some managers purposely choose to hire incompetent people to avoid being exposed, which already gives the indication they *know* they are incompetent.
Note that the incompetent may try to herd competent people back to their inept side. Since they cannot unwire competent people’s skills and knowledge from their brains, only thing left in the toolbox are ill promotions—put competent people in the wrong job. Mind the incompetent are not necessarily always malicious, as they might not be smart enough for that. As the razor goes—never attribute to malice what can be perfectly attributed to incompetence or stupidity.
On the other hand, competent people have nearly magic powers. As said, they work as incompetence Geiger counters, by contrast. The competent hire people who are more competent than them, they always double down. And they also have the power of converting the inexperienced and insecure into a functioning, useful, confident human by means of meticulous mentoring and selfless knowledge transfer. Although this requires a fair amount of energy expenditure, the competent know the multiplicative effect always justifies the amount of energy spent.