From unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.
The impact of understanding our core self, our mental models
and world view, is immense. It gives us the chance to align our decision-making process with our purpose. The ‘Hierarchy of Competence’ model explains the four stages we all go through as we learn a new skill, framework, language or concept.
Understanding this model and being able to place ourselves within it as we learn offers an insightful perspective. As a facilitator, I know where to place the learner in their journey and understand the emotions attached to help them grow.
The first stage, where most learners start, is called ‘unconscious incompetence’. This carries the idea that we don’t know because we can’t know. We are simply unaware of what we are lacking: we all have our ‘blind spots’. Imagine you are in a yoga class and the instructor asks you to do the ‘peacock pose’ (symbolizing big things — immortality and love) for the first time. You try, and almost break your wrist without knowing what you are doing wrong. Or you recently got promoted and were asked to develop a ‘digital twin’ of your organisation as a part of this new role, yet you end up designing an app. We are unaware of what we are lacking. At this stage we need patience and simple explanations (e.g. what a digital twin is) or a graphic (e.g. what the pose looks like), often with the help of a coach, mentor or facilitator facilitator, just enough to realize how much we don’t know. That’s how we reach then the second stage; ‘conscious incompetence’. You did the workshop, read the book, saw the graph, listened to the explanation, but you have a hard time remembering and applying it. It’s exhausting. This stage is quite dangerous, as we have a loose grasp of the basics, but we’re just not getting it yet. If we are going to quit, its most likely to happen now. This is the ‘moment of opportunity’ on your learning curve.
Only when you push through that ‘Kairos’ through repetitively learning by doing, will you acquire real knowledge and reach the third stage, called ‘conscious competence’. You’ve mastered the basics and are able to apply it to higher-level challenges… with time, effort, and occasionally a little help of Google to make you feel comfortable. The fourth and final stage is ‘unconscious competence’. This is the stage of mastering the skill on autopilot, completely naturally. We don’t have to think about it; we do the yoga pose easily, we digitize the organization without thinking twice. We even seek out new challenges and start the process again.
Identifying ‘blind spots’, to grow people from ‘knowing what they don’t know’ towards mastery is another critical task of facilitators and coaches.
