*The four stages of competence - do they influence or even interfere with change?*

Maybe you are silently asking yourself: shouldn’t the header rather be about incompetence? Because that’s surely what is actually impeding change?

Well. Let’s take a step back and explore a little bit, shall we?

In case you haven’t heard of the “four stages of competency”-model, let’s give it a quick update (you’ll find one way of graphically representing it above). It revolves about two attributes, the level of competency, and the level of awareness. Which is also why I like mapping it out in matrix to start with. Both attributes can be high or low, resulting in four stages of competence. There’s the unconscious and the conscious incompetence as well as the conscious and unconscious competence. All four stages are exactly what they look like from their names. So far so good.

You may have noticed the order in which I introduced them, which is also indicated by the little arrows in the above graphics.

That’s because as in most things human, there is a development aspect involved, in this case learning. And while it would be highly convenient if we were not aware of anything we do not know and then one day woke up miraculously (and unconsciously) knowing these things without consciously acquiring that knowledge – usually those knowledge fairies do not visit humble human beings.

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4 Ebenen des Lernens - Dein Coach in München — Instead, we mostly go through a process where we struggle and then become aware of something we not know (yet), take steps to acquire that knowledge, aka learn, and then through (lots of) practice form a habit and reach the stage where we unconsciously apply said knowledge.
*So when we are not categorising the stages, the actual learning process would look like this:*

And while I am all for an analytical categorisation (as in the matrix at the beginning), it’s worthwhile to keep this learning process at the forefront of our minds when considering change..

Because I heard your question – what about change and learning? Yes, what about it?

For one, change might and probably will evolve around learning: it’s come to your attention that you had a blind spot, maybe it has been suggested that you trying to sing the baby to sleep actually is a bit scary. As you realise singing is not your forte, you start looking into other options. Or you picked up a rescue dog at the shelter, and while you thought that you were reasonably fit, the dog unerringly proves that you are lacking in its eyes. And while you look into ways to keep your new dog (or baby) happy, you’ll probably also pick up new skills and change. Because yes, that is also change, not only the big life-changing jumps, but the smaller steps, too, maybe even more so.

And circling back to the initial question: it would seem that learning and change do, in fact, go hand in hand.

So where does the assumption that incompetence interferes with change come from, then?

Let’s look at what happens in a group of people, like a team at work. Sometimes, change does happen incrementally and even unconsciously as a team starts gelling and growing. Other times, one person either has an original idea for growing the team (“making it better” is often used in that context) or has been given the task. In either case, that person is at least already at the stage of “conscious incompetence” and highly likely quickly moving to “conscious competence”.

If said person tries to impart their enthusiasm and newly found knowledge to the others, there’s a certain chance that it will be met with indifference. This indifference might be mistaken for rejection when it is likely to stem from not knowing anything about the new direction, because they are, through NO fault of their own, in “unconscious incompetence” FOR THAT PARTICULAR TOPIC (only).

This situation tends to grow more pronounced when an external expert is being brought in for the sake of speed of implementation.