Four Levels of Competency
I was tickled to read in Teaching by Lecture of what N. Whitman calls the four levels of competency. The levels advance thus (my paraphrasing in parenthesis):
- Unconscious incompetence (you don’t know you can’t do it)
- Conscious incompetence (you know you can’t do it)
- Conscious competence (you know how to do it)
- Unconscious competence (you can do it, but you don’t know how).
I was interested to see that all the references used in this article were pre-1980…. some time before I finished work in 1999, I was accused by a junior member of my staff of having an ‘atedeluvian bookshelf’……I myself considered it to be eclectic.
I learned these levels from Tony Robbins at one of his weekend seminars.
They were presented as a sequence of learning; i.e. you progress from
Unconsciously Incompetent to finally being Unconsciously Competent at
any skill. The example is driving a car.
Unconsciously Incompetent: The young teenager who thinks it’s no big
deal to drive and can’t understand why Dad/Mom don’t just toss him the
car keys and let him head on out.
Consciously Incompetent: The 15/16 year old who’s starting to take driving
lessons who realizes it isn’t as easy as it looks, especially on the freeway!
Consciously Competent: The driver trainee who now feels confident behind
the wheel but knows s/he is still THINKING it through each time he starts
the engine, backs out of the driveway, etc. etc.
Unconsciously Competent: The driver who hops in the car and heads home from
work thinking about dinner, a fight with the boss, the jerk in the next car,
etc. etc. (This driver is not THINKING about every little move he makes to
drive the car, but certainly KNOWS HOW to drive and knows how he knows.)
See also “imposter syndrome”