When learning anything new, there are four distinct phases to progress through. They tend to be steps, rather than a continuous climb. That’s why I like the concept of a staircase better than a curve. This applies when gaining new expertise yourself, and also when training other personnel.
Step 1: Unconscious Incompetence, Bliss
This is the phase where you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s always the starting point, and typically does not cause any distress. It’s more a sense of false satisfaction. It’s typically short-lived, but a pure and calm sensation. As soon as a conflict develops, or some form of needed end result is not being met, this phase disappears of its own accord and we move into (or are forced into) the next step.
Step 2: Conscious Incompetence, Fear
This is the phase where you are confronted with your own ignorance, lack of expertise, lack of experience, etc. It’s usually a feeling of “Oh No!”. A common response to this is to try to escape back to Step 1, but this is a one-way door. You can’t go backwards on this staircase. You can, however, get stuck on this step, which is a damaging outcome. This phase does not resolve spontaneously, but must be worked through. The keys to getting through this phase involve:
- Confront brutal reality (to use Collins’ phrase). No hiding, pretending, buck-passing, etc.
- Inventory skills, resources and expertise areas that must be gained.
- Realize that getting to the next step involves a finite learning endeavor. It’s not an endless amount of information and resources.
Step 3: Conscious Competence: Awkwardness
This is the phase where you are actually practicing new methods, building and culturing new resources, and streamlining and simplifying your execution. The more complex the endeavor, and the more people that are involved in the outcome, the clumsier it will be in the beginning. If the endeavor is something you alone are responsible for, it may take a Herculean effort to simply complete the first pass. The first few times you are able to complete a new skill area, it may be literally exhausting, both physically and mentally. This is because you are not yet efficient, and is essentially temporary. A few points:
- Repetition is the key to learning complex tasks.
- Feedback helps to make learning more efficient. This can be self-generated or obtained from an outside source, such as another person or a recording device.
- High complexity areas may take a shockingly long time to become well learned. The 10,000 hour figure is widely accepted for these areas (per Gladwell), which is 5 years of 40 hour weeks!
Step 4: Unconscious Competence: Automation
This is the phase where the desired end result is obtained, but you are not necessarily aware of how you are doing it. A useful concept here is “chunking”. This concept refers to the idea that a set of individual skills and resources can be combined into a single action. An example is driving a car. During Step 3, the new driver is hyper vigilant (we hope) about every detail of driving. It’s difficult and exhausting. After practice, experience and repeated exposure to learning opportunities, it becomes automatic, and we are not even aware of the individual skills necessary to accomplish the end result. A few points:
- Automatic function is efficient, but may not be appropriate if conditions or demands change. Re-learning is usually a part of very high functioning individuals and systems.
- Automatic function may make it difficult to teach or transfer knowledge. It can be quite challenging to explain exactly how you were able to perform a complex task to someone who is in stage 2 or 3. Retrieval of the individual steps can be useful in training and also in altering and tuning the function.
- In larger groups, automatic functioning can lead to hyper specialization and vulnerability to obsolescence. If you end up being seen as very good at only one thing, you are no longer in a position of strength. It’s a good idea to be developing other skills that may only be in step 2 or 3.
While we all have our natural strengths and weaknesses, no one is born in step 4. Knowing where you are on the staircase and taking conscious steps to get to the next step are crucial to developing the rewards of step 4.
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