Presenting through the lens of unconscious competence

Unconscious competence

We move through life, professionally and personally, developing skills we barely seem to notice. With enough repetition, intention, and presence, certain abilities become so natural that we forget the journey we experienced to learn them in the first place. Yet this journey to that point of excellence is rarely without struggle and effort. We typically begin this journey by not knowing what we don’t know. We then stumble into the realization that gaps exist, and then commit, sometimes painstakingly, to closing them. These are the Four Stages of Competency, and today, I saw an example of unconscious competence.

You can develop competence through a combination of innate knowledge and a conscious effort to acquire new skills and knowledge. This requires self-awareness of your present strengths as well as acknowledgment of your own incompetence in particular disciplines. Through independent practice or employee training, you can address deficiencies and amass competence in new disciplines. MasterClass - Four Stages of Competence and the Learning Process

The Four Stages of Competency

The framework itself dates back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. It first appeared in educator Martin Broadwell’s description of the “four levels of teaching,” and was later refined by Noel Burch. Noel, a training specialist at Gordon Training International, shaped it into the model we use to understand how people learn new skills. In its modern form, the stages progress as follows:

• Unconscious Incompetence—not yet recognizing a skill is missing.

• Conscious Incompetence—becoming aware of the gap.

• Conscious Competence—performing the skill with effort and focus.

• Unconscious Competence—executing fluidly, almost automatically.

The unconscious competence I witnessed was born from what the presenter referred to as a kind of “positive procrastination” after a rock-star presentation. This person had spent a few hours leading up to the presentation to assemble a slide deck to capture their organization’s transformation. The shared theme was the importance of clarity from the leader’s message, collective momentum, and a shared mission to transform an organization. The slides were simple, clean, and unintimidating. No abundance of bullet points. No decorative excess or symbolism overkill. Even the godfather of data visualizations, Edward Tufte, would have applauded the presentation’s ink ratio.

The presenter only committed to organizing their actual commentary for about twenty minutes before stepping onstage to accompany the visuals. And yet the delivery was confident, coherent, and deeply connected to the material. A masterpiece of clarity, alignment, and storytelling on how to transform an organization.

Instructors should therefore aim to create an environment which will ensure that learners; experience positive and activating emotions, feel intrinsically motivated, believe that they are competent enough to be successful, and feel in control of their learning. The Neuroscience of Learning

Unconscious Competency

But here’s what made the results remarkable. That level of preparation did not come from rehearsing a script. Instead, it came from belonging to the information and being part of the transformation. This individual was the framer of the work and present in the information that the data showed. The results showed an unconscious incompetence stage that was uncovered from the conscious incompetence, and commitment to becoming consciously competent through commitment and repetition. This is the subtle power of unconscious competence. It was a display that shows when knowledge becomes integrated enough that it no longer needs to be performed. It simply flows.