WebEx and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? The following working definition comes to us courtesy of Wikipedia:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.
In my professional experience, most organizations' "pain points" with WebEx Meeting Center can be explained by a healthy combination of the following factors:
- Lack of training. Has your organization provided you with any education as to how to use WebEx Meeting Center? Or, more likely, are employees expected simply to somehow, by osmosis perhaps, "know how to use it"?
- Lack of self-awareness. This lack I speak of is an institutional dearth of self-awareness. If an organization wanting to leverage WebEx technologies realizes with clarity how much time it is wasting in bumbling around with the software itself, then this should inspire the decision-makers within those organizations to provide adequate training resources to all involved parties.
Where to Go from Here
I think I've made the point that I strongly feel that institutional self-awareness and education represent the answer to most organization's WebEx Meeting Center woes. To be sure, Cisco makes user documentation available in all organizational WebEx portals. However, in my experience these documentation links are difficult to find, especially when the "heat is on" and your meeting is scant minutes away; and the literature tends to be heavy on "marketingspeak" and light on content.
By contrast, would you consider the purchase of a Que book called Using WebEx Meeting Center? Would it make a difference to you if said book included a DVD chock-full of videos that demonstrated the common WebEx tasks discussed therein?
Please let us know in the comments portion of this article; we look forward to receiving your feedback.