Unconscious Competence
I've been learning to DJ this year. It's the perfect hobby for me, because practising it involves sitting listening to music for hours on end, which I did before anyway. I mostly suck at it so far, but the more I practice, the more I can feel some progress and improvement happening.
As I've been learning, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the four stages of competence model, so I thought I'd talk about that model, and why it's so valuable to us in our work.
The idea, if you're not familiar, is that we go through four distinct phases when we learn and develop new skills:
unconscious incompetence
conscious incompetence
conscious competence
unconscious competence
When I went for my first DJ lesson, I was presented with a mixing desk full of buttons, and it all felt a bit alien. I didn't know what all these buttons on the mixing desk did, I had no idea what I needed to do to get better. Unconscious Incompetence.
Next is Conscious Incompetence. As I started beat-matching, I'd start to notice my mistakes ("ah! If I just do that differently next time, I'll get better!"). This part of the process really matters. We need to give ourselves the permission to be rubbish, to try and fail. Rich learning comes from the mistakes.
Then the magic happens. Conscious Competence. It takes so much concentration, but we finally start to be able to pull off some kind of level of passable skill. I am just starting to reach this with DJing. And I keep telling myself that as I learn, the mistakes are still part of the process. They'll happen if I switch off for an instant or something unexpected happens, and that's OK.
And then finally, we reach Unconscious Competence. The best way to explain this is to think about how you were driving on the day of your driving test, versus the way you drive now. The more you practice, the more you're able to stop thinking about the processes, the "mirror-signal-manouvres" and are able to almost switch off and drive without even giving it a second thought. I'm definitely not there with the DJing yet, but it's a good goal to have.
This 4 stages of competence model throws up a number of useful lessons for us in our work:
Most of the time when we want to get better at stuff, not starting completely from scratch. We might want to increase our productivity, or get better at presentation skills, or a piece of software we use may have been given an 'exciting new look', which means the buttons we're used to finding in one place now live somewhere else. In many ways this is actually harder than starting from scratch, as we have a level of 'unconsious competence' already, which can be hard to unpick. We have to step 'down' a level or two, back to conscious competence or even conscious incompetence, in order to develop a new set of skills that's better than what went before. It takes patience and commitment to put ourselves in a learning mindset instead of staying in the comfort zone of 'just-about-adequate doing' mode.
The natural talent fallacy. Sometimes we want to learn from people who have an unconscious competence that we admire, but weirdly, the fact that it's an effortless habit for them makes them bad teachers, not good ones. Find the person who can remember their struggles with conscious incompetence and conscious competence and you'll find someone who can relate more easily to your journey.
As managers and leaders, we might be on the other side of this fence, too. It's often kinder and more helpful in the long run to create a safe space for someone to make mistakes than to offer them the advice that means they avoid all mistakes. The learning-by-failing matters. When you're supporting someone's growth, it often means overriding your own temptation to intervene.
And finally, the 4 stages model is a reminder of that sage advice that "it's all about the journey, not the destination". There's something inherently fulfilling about that cycle of 'try-fail-learn-test': learning new skills and developing new habits keeps us growing and releases all those reward-chemicals in the brain. When we're still learning, it's harder to go stale, and staying curious means we're able to solve more of the challenges that life throws up.
I'd love to know when you last experienced the joys of conscious incompetence. Feel free to comment below!