Knowing your audience is an important factor in producing effective training events.Individuals move from one level to the next as their knowledge and experience grows.
UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE
You don’t know what you don’t know
Before you begin to learn any skill you start at the level of Unconscious Incompetence (UI) where you have no knowledge or experience and it just looks like magic.
When you were a child and you watched someone drive, it looked so simple, they just got in, started the engine and just drove. You were unaware of what was required to make the car go, in fact it didn’t even occur to you that it was a special skill.
For a budding musician, this is the point where they start saying that they want to learn a particular instrument, with out knowing what it entails and how much work is involved.
Often at the UI level you are not even fully aware of the skill or knowledge, it is just something that happens in the world, and your knowledge of what is needed to achieve competence in the skill is outside of you experience.
It is the ‘Introduction’ stage to a subject.
CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE
You know what you don’t know
At this point you’ve picked up the little black and yellow book entitled “…for DUMMIES”, and you now know exactly how much work is involved in learning the skill. At this point you are probably looking to learn the skill, and are investigating ways to actually acquire the skills you want.
This is often considered as the ‘Learning’ stage where you learn the basic skills and you can begin to undertake training. As this stage progresses you will become better at the skill, although you will still be learning.
In driving terms, this is when you start taking lessons and begin to understand what is required to get you through a test. You will be aware of what you don’t know, and how much you need to do to qualify onto the next stage.
For the musician this is the hours and hours of practice, learning the scales, reading music and the endless repetitiveness of lessons.
CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE
You know what you know, and you know it
The ‘Practice’ level of learning, where you know that you are able to perform, but you need to think about what you are doing to do it well. This is where experience starts to build, and where people start to add their own styles and approaches to a skill.
For the driver, this is the point that they have been working towards, and is usually about the time that they will take their driving test. Although they know how to drive, and are competent drivers, much of what goes on needs to be thought about.
Musicians have usually reached a point of being able to play by sight reading music, or by ear. They will still have to think about the process of playing, and will need to practice complex pieces but they know how to play and are just building experience.
UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE
You don’t know how, you just do
At this level you are ‘Qualified’, and your ability within the skill is such that you it just appears to happen naturally.
In fact, the skills have become so well used that they have become totally internalised. In fact at this level so much of the skill is outside of conscious perception that it is difficult to explain how you do it.
An easy way to tell if you have reached this level of competence in a skill is to analyse what you are doing as you do it. Talk yourself through it as you go, and if it becomes difficult or impossible to do then you have reached this level of competence. If when you bring the skill back to a conscious analysis it becomes hard, then you are operating at the Unconscious Competence level.
For drivers, this level can be reached within just a few weeks, and the first realisation that you are operating at an unconscious level is when you get to your destination, and you can’t remember how you got there, and whether you actually stopped at that red light!
Musicians usually find that they are playing and holding a conversation at the same time, usually without missing a note. Professional musicians are easily within this level.
EXPERT
10,000 hours and all that
There is a great deal of controversy about this level, as it really is a high level of Unconscious Competence, but it is worth mentioning as it can be important when dealing with specialists within certain areas.
This is a level of competence that is reached after considerable experience, which has been estimated at about 10,000 hours of practice. This is the amount of practice that is typically seen in concert level musicians, or world class sports stars and Chess grand masters.
At this level of knowledge the skill is part of the person, and requires little or no conscious thought, and the mind can literally be off somewhere else with no drop in performance. However, this level is often characterised by individuals who are consumed and focused on the skill to the exclusion of everything else.
It really is a case of knowing more and more about less and less.
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