It's not incompetence

In this episode, we explore a common conceptual trap that, if we’re not careful, can leave us feeling unable to act

Okay, this one’s a bit technical-ish, but it’s really important for anyone who’s working on change.

I had a really nice reply from my colleague Nate Gerber about the ‘Hypocrite’ post a couple of weeks back, which included this question:

I am also concerned about our capacity to build an honest and forward-looking view - how might we nourish our spirit to engage with needed change and not dismiss the often difficult challenges we face?

I'd suppose that the short answer is that I don't have any easy answers on that. All I can think of right now is a combination of three things - two of which I've already written about here, the other one about which, yes, I do need to write. Hence this episode.

First, we need to build that habit of noticing - to notice the small details, just notice the world around us, and allow the world to show us itself, and its hints about possible change.

Second, we need to allow Inverse-Murphy to help us. Inverse-Murphy is literally the inverse of Murphy's Law - Murphy applied to itself. The phrasing for that is "things can work, if we let them - but if we only let things work in expected ways, we're limiting our chances!". So use Noticing to provide the input for Inverse-Murphy, and watch for those subtle moments in which we can act on often-unexpected gaps where change can happen.

And third, which I hadn’t written about before, is the ‘conscious-incompetence’ trap. It’s a simple cognitive-error that unfortunately is really easy to fall into, and can leave us lost in a crushing sense of incompetence and failure, an unbearable moment of doom-and-gloom:

All of which, however, is completely unwarranted…

The first point here is that it’s not incompetence: even at worst, what’s going on here is noncompetence, which is not the same thing at all. Incompetence is where we delude ourselves into thinking that we know what we’re doing when we actually don’t; noncompetence is when we know that we don’t know what we’re doing, and are willing to work with that fact.

To make sense of what’s going on here, think of one of those classic ‘two-axis matrix’ frames, so beloved in business and elsewhere. In this case, the two axes are ‘unconscious versus conscious’, and ‘noncompetent versus competent’. This gives us four pairings, which we can line up in a development-sequence: unconscious-noncompetence, which is often all we could expect from a trainee; conscious-noncompetence, which we’d commonly see in an apprentice; conscious-competence, which is what we need from a journeyman, someone who can just get on with the job without any supervision; and unconscious-competence, the skills of a master who can rise with almost casual ease to any challenge that Reality Department might throw at them.

The point here is we start out oblivious about our noncompetence - we’re unconscious about it, we don't know that we don’t know, we can't see that we're not seeing what's going on. True, sometimes it’s intentionally unconscious, a wilful denial of reality - such as had happened for decades about the reality of climate change and more. But once we do start to see - become conscious of reality, such as the rude awakening about climate-change during the current northern summer - what happens then is that we became aware not only about our previous unawareness, but also our seeming inability to do anything about it: in other words, conscious-noncompetence. And if we're not careful, that can be really, really depressing and debilitating - and can trick us into giving up, thinking that we’re hopeless, and that there's no hope. Hence that crushing sense of doom-and-gloom and all that…

When we hit that state, the way out of that trap is to recognise that this is not a failure, but is actually an improvement. Before, we were completely oblivious, we couldn’t have done anything useful at all, in fact more likely just get in the way of anyone actually trying to do something useful about it; but once we open up into conscious-noncompetence, we’re now at least conscious of what’s going on. Don’t doubt it, that is an improvement: we’re now at least able to do something useful about it, if only to know when to keep out of the way.

Sure, when we first make that shift into conscious-noncompetence, we won’t be able to do much that’s useful: but we’re now able to learn what to do, which we couldn’t have done before. That is an improvement.

Yes, it’ll still feel hard, still feel challenging. When skills are involved, there’s no way to get there other than through experience and, all too often, a fair amount of failure and another visit through that dark place again. When that happens, look for the learning, remember that it’s an improvement, then climb out of the dark-space again to have another try. We have to be able to allow ourselves to screw up, allow ourselves to be comfortable about being uncomfortable, and just keep going, keep going, keep up on with the practice.

And if can we do that, there comes a point where, often without warning, we realise 'Hey, I can do this stuff!' - the first transition into conscious-competence. And we can keep building from there, toward a full conscious-competence, and onward towards the unconscious-competence of the master.

But to get there, we first have to be able to get ourselves past that trap. To do that, just remember that it’s not incompetence, that instead it’s the first opening of hope and possibility - and build on outward from there.

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