The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of my favorite heuristics to discuss. In effect, it basically says the bigger the mouth you have, the less you really know. A possible corollary to this is that the more confident someone is, the more it reveals a lack of introspection and self-awareness of all the things that could possibly go wrong with an assertion.

Don Rumsfeld said there are unknowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. It’s this third one that catches people. Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Below are some memes I have gathered up over time on this:

The Foundation Repair Industry’s Confidence Problem

This heuristic is central to many problems in the foundation repair industry. Foundation repair salespeople are often hired because of their ability to project confidence. 

On the other hand, engineers have a complex knowledge of all the various things that could interfere with a conclusion or recommendation and tend to be probabilistic in their assertions. 

I remember when I first became a foundation repair contractor and became educated in the very basics of the industry. I was so proud of what I learned… of course, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which is the crux of the problem.

Why Confidence Sells: The Salesperson’s Edge

When we hired foundation repair salespeople, we looked for a DISC profile that would help them project confidence. Pretty much everyone else in the industry does something similar. Most of these guys make somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 a year, which is considerably more than the average person, and so they have a considerable ego that goes along to help them with their confidence. 

Part of their training tells them that they are smarter than engineers and that there’s no one out there better equipped to deal with these customers than themselves.

As engineers, particularly Geotech engineers, we learn how much we really don’t know. Particularly about soil, where we must extrapolate from limited information what a profile might be and what its characteristics are. In addition, almost every rule of thumb I have discussed in previous blogs, like this one, can have an exception that goes the opposite way. This requires us to keep an open mind and entertain mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously while stacking up the evidence and weighing it on either side. 

This process makes us aware of the data from the opposing point of view and tempers our confidence in our conclusion. Indeed, part of our job is to understand not only our recommendations but also how confident we are in each of them. 

Some of our recommendations may be more confident than others. This awareness makes it difficult to match the overconfidence and bravado of a foundation repair salesperson who doesn’t know what they don’t know.

The Power of Overconfidence and Enthusiasm

As engineers, we must learn to find ways of asserting our position to match the overconfidence and bravado. For most engineers, the psychological profile is different from a typical salesperson’s profile. Typically, there would be a little less drive, a lot less sociability, and a need for influence and recognition. Of course, there are always exceptions. 

When the foundation repair salesperson stands in front of a customer, they are projecting their confidence and enthusiasm. If the same homeowner meets with an engineer, the engineer will think in terms of probabilities and less in terms of absolutes and probably will not project confidence and enthusiasm like a salesperson would.

This overconfidence and enthusiasm can sometimes influence homeowners who don’t understand the technical parts of this business. Put on top of this all the sales aids, fancy custom video clips, and sales training, and the foundation repair sales guy has a distinct advantage.

A Phoenix Contractor’s Case Study

I recall a particular contractor in the Phoenix area who claimed that he was the only one who could diagnose foundation problems correctly. In fact, this particular individual had never driven a single pier into the ground, never injected any poly or grouting of any kind into the soil, and had never conducted a single floor elevation survey. 

However, his overconfidence, enthusiasm, and bravado, especially on YouTube, convinced many people that he was, in fact, the only one who could help them understand the problems they were having. 

Quite often, his advice was wrongheaded because he didn’t know what he couldn’t know. I recall him looking at a gap of dried out, clay soil next to a stem wall, where the gap was almost an inch and a half wide… in the same sentence, as he pointed it out, he also asserted that this was not caused by expansive soil. 

A Path Forward: Engineers Must Evolve

If engineers are to succeed over foundation repair salespeople, to protect the public, we must find ways to assert our opinions and recommendations more convincingly. This means visuals, stories, easy-to-understand analogies, and evidence that is easy to see. 

At the same time, we must remain cognizant of the weaknesses or our assertions and match our solutions with the risk tolerance of the customer and their ability to afford less risky and correspondingly more expensive solutions.