Karen Martin beschrijft in haar boek The Outstanding Organization de link tussen het Dunning-Kruger effect en het risico op het toepassen van iets-in-name-only (bijv. Lean, Prince2 of Agile), waarbij je alleen de 'vormen' toepast en niet de 'functies':
Missing the Trees for the Forest
In many of the organizations with which I've worked, I've noticed that managers and workers simply don't see the chaos or the causes of chaos around them. The types of behaviors that result in chaos usually are not purposeful, but in many cases they have become habitual—which makes them all the more damaging to an organization striving to be outstanding. Habits are nearly invisible. You engage in them without realizing they are there. And you can look at another organization that is succeeding and not notice the real differences between how that outstanding organization behaves and how your organization behaves. When looking at outstanding organizations, you may miss the important trees and just see the forest.
This type of blind spot is similar to what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, after the two psychologists who described it. Basically, the Dunning-Kruger effect notes that people who are truly incompetent don't know that they are incompetent.'
They lack the knowledge that allows them to understand the difference between competence and incompetence. If you apply this concept to the world of organizational performance, you begin to understand why organizations often adopt improvement tools and isolated components of holistic improvement philosophies but consistently fail to see the things that truly make a difference in performance.
My colleague Tim Ogden introduced me to the work of economist Lant Pritchett, who describes this process as isomorphic mimicry, a phrase that means the copying of forms rather than functions. It's similar to, for instance, non-venomous snakes that have evolved to look like their poisonous cousins. These pretenders will fool you if you don't look too closely, but they can't execute when it really matters. Pritchett uses it to explain why so many years of work by high-powered consultants and billions of dollars of aid to developing countries hasn't produced well-functioning government institutions. These efforts often have been focused on getting the governments to mimic the government institutions in developed countries as they exist today. But these institutions usually developed and changed over a long period of time and work only because of the behaviors, capabilities, culture, and habits that developed. Copying these institutions in their current form, without the history, culture, knowledge, experience, and habits that underlie them, produces tepid results at best. The institutions just don't function, even though they look identical to the functioning institutions in developed countries on paper.
