The Trap of Unconscious Competence?

My mother used to call and ask me to come over and fix her computer. While she could tell when there was something wrong with it (“It says it can’t find the printer but the printer is right where it always is!”), she didn’t have the knowledge or skills that fixing it required. I did, as I had been working with computers since my first Commodore 64 crawled from the primordial sludge of 20th century technology. Each time she needed my help, I was able to take care of the problem and get things running smoothly again. She would always ask me to explain to her how I knew what was wrong and how I knew what to do to fix it. Those were uncomfortable questions for me because I was working on the basis of many years troubleshooting and fixing hardware and software. I could fix her PC but what I couldn’t do was EXPLAIN to her how I knew what to do. She wanted to take notes and follow whatever I’d done, step by step, so she could take care of it herself, the next time. But it didn’t work that way, I had say; I didn’t come over with even a plan of what to do. What I had was a depth and breadth of knowledge that served up routines and subroutines of ‘if this, do this’ without me having to be consciously aware of it. So I could fix her computer but I couldn’t teach her how to do it herself. Not without spending a lot of time dredging my knowledge up to a conscious level, at least. I always felt bad about that; if “teaching a man to fish” is the best way to proceed for all involved, all I could ever do is hand my mother a fish each time her computer misbehaved.

The Conscious Competence Ladder (also known as the Conscious Competence Matrix or Learning Matrix and available at Mindtools.com) is a 4-level scale popularly used to gauge levels of knowledge, proficiency, or expertise. Its levels are as follows:

• Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence (You don’t know that you don’t know)
• Level 2: Conscious Incompetence (You know that you don’t know)
• Level 3: Conscious Competence (You know that you know)
  • At this level you acquire the new skills and knowledge. You put your learning into practice and you gain confidence in carrying out the tasks or jobs involved. You are aware of your new skills and work on refining them.
• Level 4: Unconscious Competence (You don’t know that you know)
  • At this level your new skills become habits, and you perform the task without conscious effort and with automatic ease.

Level 4 is commonly accepted as being the ‘expert’ level where the learned knowledge and/or skills and the performance proficiency that accompany them have become habitual and are no longer even consciously considered.

While this may be loosely correlated with the Levels of Learner Knowledge (or even Bloom’s Taxonomy), what is far more interesting is the consciousness dimension of the levels. This is not simply having or not having knowledge, skills, and/or ability to perform but awareness of whether one does or does not have those things. (Note that knowledge, skills, and ability have been conflated in this model). Consider the implications of that awareness as shown by the descriptions of Level 3 and Level 4. At the Conscious Competence level of proficiency (Level 3), the awareness of skills makes working to refine or improve them possible. Contrast this with Level 4, Unconscious Competence, where there is no longer that awareness and performance is habitual, unconscious, and automatic.

If you’re truly no longer conscious of knowing something, doesn’t that imply that you’re probably not the best person to train or teach another to attain that same level of proficiency? After all, how can you teach someone something you’re not consciously aware of? I couldn’t, at least when it came to my mother and fixing her computer.

Is a lack of awareness on the part of an expert with respect to his or her proficiency ever a positive thing? Or is it a kind of ‘expert’s blind spot’, where growth, improvement, and even transmission of learning to others have ceased to be possible? Have you ever encountered this ‘blind spot’ in another? In yourself? To what degree can unconscious competence actually be a hindrance to optimal or ever-improved performance? And finally, does the context matter? If we’re talking about a surgeon, an engineer, and a sociology professor, is it more critical for one of the presumed experts to be conscious of his or her competence?