Rona Dougall: We need more from leaders than a gung-ho spirit and delusions of adequacy self-belief

These days my Twitter feed seems to be almost entirely dominated by pictures and memes of dogs being impossibly cute, cats climbing into boxes and even a puppy being mothered by a hen. Adorable.

I’m no tech expert but I think there must be an algorithm that senses I find the current political situation too much and I just need soothing images of animals.

A stand-out post this week was of a tiny sausage dog carrying a stick about five times its size, knocking over a random human as it went on its merry way. Was the dog being far too ambitious or just delusional?

Turns out there’s a name for this. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where incompetent people wildly overestimate their ability. In other words, these idiots think they are gallus. And they are not. The effect was named after US social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999.

“In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed or cautious,” Dunning has written. “Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.”

Interestingly, they found that women were less prone in general to this self-delusion than men. But there’s always an exception.

I first heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect when someone was describing the 44-day tenure of Liz Truss, the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister. Why, one political commentator wondered, had she even stood in the first place when she was clearly not up to the job?

To take on the biggest role in politics requires a mind-boggling degree of self-belief, an almost staggering arrogance that you above all others deserve the gig. When matched with talent, we are blessed with successful leaders. And when it’s not, we get Liz Truss.

It’s not just politics either. I was intrigued to see Prince Harry – who, as far as I know, doesn’t have a global reputation as a business leader – telling 700 CEOs at a summit in San Francisco that they should “individually grow themselves” to “scale up their companies”. What unutterable guff. I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Most of us probably know someone a bit like this. There was a journalist when I first started working who would regularly tell people that he was the best reporter in Scotland. He said it so often, and with such confidence, that many started to believe him. He’s now very successful abroad. It was only later that I realised he was all smoke and mirrors.

Apologies male readers but I think men, as I mentioned earlier, are much more guilty of this than women. You tell any female colleague that they have done a good job or excelled at something and the reply is invariably, “Oh, not really, it was rubbish,” or, “It wasn’t that great”.

Getting a man to come on telly as a guest is often much easier than a woman as guys seem to have a lot more confidence talking about stuff. And even if they’re not experts, heck, they will give it a go.

We need to get over that. STV has been running media training sessions for women from the country’s business community over the last few years to empower them to share their knowledge. It’s been a huge success.

The days of white men in suits dominating panel discussions are long gone. Recently I presented a programme that only had female guests. It wasn’t deliberate and we really didn’t think it was a big deal, but it is evidence that we are making progress.