Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending some structured learning with my fellow Sr. Managers of the Customer Support organization. I entered into it rather skeptically, I did not have the background my colleagues had – they were ready, willing and able – but I also feel strongly that if I am going to do anything I will give it my all otherwise I might just as well do something else.
And so I opened up my mind to go beyond the words, beyond the marketing and see if there wasn’t something there that might just be worthwhile for me. Much of it was language I had (wrongly) rejected years ago as buzz words and silly talk.
I’m a bit dense and sometimes the simplest things elude me. Take “buzz words” for instance. I’m inherently skeptical whenever I hear anybody start using buzz words and my spidey-sense starts to tingle. But it’s taken me quite some time to really appreciate that myths and legends start from something real and that buzz words come from something real as well. It’s the people who believe that simply saying something makes that something come true that drive that skepticism – “you need to be goal oriented”, “there are no problems only solutions”, “empower the employees” – those are all very good goals, if you hadn’t heard the phrases a bazillion times you might even understand the meat behind the phrase.
But all too often *I* find that people grab the words but don’t really own them. That happens so often that I find myself not even looking deeper to find out if anybody has some meat to the bones. As I said, I’m a bit dense.
Probably one of the most oft ignored buzz words for me is “goal” – must be “goal oriented”, “list your goals” etc. Humbug said I, by the time I have a goal set I have bypassed it for something new! I’m a bit dense.
Anyway, I’m going to try to write up a few of the things I learned last week – other than the fact that I’m a bit dense (which isn’t really news to me or likely to you gentle reader). Perhaps there is something others can learn as well.
Today’s lesson is on the cycle that is learning & knowing. All things known to an individual, it is argued, flow through the same life cycle:
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Unconscious Incompetence – we are not aware of what we need to learn
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Conscious Incompetence – we are aware of what we need to learn
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Conscious Competence – we are aware of what we have learned
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Unconscious Competence – Knowledge
The best example I saw was on driving a car – clearly until one has driven a car (or at least seen somebody else drive) you cannot and are not able to be aware of what things you need to learn – how could you? This is Unconscious Incompetence.
After a very short period of instruction “here is a steering wheel, it turns the car; here is the accelerator, it provides power; here is the brake, it is how you stop” etc. You quickly become aware of the things you need to learn – how the steering wheel feels, how hard to push the brake, what happens when you ‘floor it’. Conscious Incompetence.
Then as you practice and learn you become aware of the car, of your feet on the brake, your hands on the wheel – that you need to look in the mirrors, that you have blind spots. There are dozens perhaps 100s of things to balance and learn and as you drive your mind quickly flips through all of the tasks. You are aware of the things you have learned and are consciously applying them. Conscious Competence.
Still not quite “knowledge” yet, it takes effort, conscious effort to apply the learning – you have to think about looking in the mirrors, think about how much pressure to apply, think about how wide and long the car actually is.
But after a while many of us, dare I say most of us? learn it at a deeper level. When I try to explain it to new drivers, I say you need to “feel like the car is part of you”. I don’t think about how wide my car is, I already ‘know’ (though I couldn’t give you the dimensions). I look and “feel” whether I (me and the car) will fit through that gap. I don’t think about it at all in the general case.
Rather, I’m listening to the radio, talking to passengers, thinking about my day, drinking a cupper, or smoking a cigarette (well, not anymore but) – maybe all of that at the same time – and my driving doesn’t suffer, I’m in automatic mode. I can literally drive for 100 miles and not really be conscious of the drive except for the one or two spots where I had to jump back to driving because of conditions. This is Unconscious Competence, or as I would say it, this is KNOWLEDGE.
So what, do I hear you say? How is that useful knowledge?
I’m not sure. I think it is very useful to be able to classify things at times; it’s a helpful device to be able to determine what it might take to gain “knowledge”. Surely the road to knowledge is different for those who do not even know what it is they need to know than it is for those who just need to move from conscious effort to ‘automatic mode’. The tasks that must be completed are different – just knowing which step to knowledge you are at has to be some help.
But for me at least there is more there … just labeling things like this allows me to see ‘the forest for the trees’ or probably more correctly ‘the trees for the forest’. As soon as I saw this description I realized that many of my instruction techniques are doomed to failure as I hadn’t taken into account these different phases. On the other hand, many of my instruction techniques fit right into this model without even knowing it. Rather than this just being an academic exercise, I now have a tool to use to determine what the appropriate teaching methodology might be.
For instance, as near as I can tell, there is only one path to Unconscious Competence – practice. If I have determined that you already have the Conscious Competence then the instruction is over and the hounding for practice begins – music teachers have known this for years, all the theory in the world won’t teach your fingers where those piano keys are.
On the other hand, if you don’t know what a piano is or what a musical scale is, putting somebody in front of a piano to ‘practice’ is not likely to produce very good results.
Now if I can only figure out how to use this in my day-to-day life…
kinch
