In psychology, The Four Stages of Competence or "Conscience Competence" learning model describes the progression from incompetence to competence in learning a new skill. The model first appeared in the 1960s and was further developed in the 1970s by Dr. Noel Burch.
- Unconscious Incompetence: In this stage, people don’t understand what they are doing wrong because they lack both the skill and the awareness of it. Like an untrained operator attempting to run heavy machinery—errors occur because they don’t know what they’re missing. Even their gut feel (intuition) about what is required, or their performance is wrong.
- Conscious Incompetence: Here, individuals realize they lack the necessary skill. This is often the most uncomfortable stage but critical for growth. A construction manager, for example, may realize during a safety audit that their site inspections need improvement. They can see the outcome differences, but their analysis of the environmental details and actions required is wrong.
- Conscious Competence: At this stage, individuals have learned the skill but need to concentrate to perform it properly. A site supervisor might now know how to manage labor productivity but must continuously reference checklists or feedback to avoid mistakes. They are deliberately following a process to analyze the environment, make decisions, and take action.
- Unconscious Competence: At the final stage, people can perform the skill automatically. A seasoned construction foreman, for instance, can manage a project schedule efficiently without needing detailed instructions because it has become second nature.
Evaluate the skills and behaviors for a job role against the person in the role using this model. Build a development roadmap for your team.
EXCESSIVE RISKS
The level of "Unconscious Incompetence" represents significant safety risks on a jobsite or financial risks at the project management level.
OPTIMAL TRAINING
The best level for training and developing others is when someone has been at the point of "Conscious Competence" for a while. They deeply know and understand the process required to create the outcome so they can break it down into small learnable chunks for someone new.
If someone has been performing at the "Unconscious Competence" level for too long, they may be producing great outcomes but if they have internalized too much of the process, they won't be effective at teaching others.
DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT (COGNITIVE BIAS)
In 1999 David Dunning and Justin Kruger described the tendency of people with limited competence in a particular domain to overestimate their abilities. This cognitive bias is described well in the five-minute video below:
You can see the connections between this research and The Four Stages of Competence Model.
THE CAPABILITY:CONFIDENCE RATIO (OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE PATH)
The ideal performance path is perfectly balanced. Trying to perform beyond your capabilities will lead to too much risk. Continuously performing below your capabilities is too conservative providing a lower return than you could safely get.
Note that for optimal learning, you will be intentionally pushing your performance above that perfectly balanced approach. Provide for "safe landings" and be deliberate in your practice so that you learn quickly from the misses rather than just building bad habits.
THE DUNNING-KRUGER CURVE (ACTUAL PERCEPTION)
As compared to the optimal performance curve balancing out confidence with capabilities, the tendency is for self-evaluated competence to shoot up quickly in the beginning. This initial spike is also typically associated with someone having low acceptance of feedback and training. This represents a zone of significant risk whether it is just slow performance at best or catastrophic safety or business risk at the worst.
The middle part of the curve can be equally problematic where people are fully capable of performing at a higher-level but are only seeing how much they don't know. This is where the discipline of management and leadership comes into play.
As someone approaches the "Expert" end of the competency level, they may have trouble relating to others just starting out as they think what they know is more "Common Knowledge." You see this a lot when a newer generation is being talked about by someone 2-3 generations older.
RELATED COGNITIVE BIASES
As beginners, we will tend to experience Illusory Superiority where we tend to overestimate their own abilities. We don't know what we don't know.
At the intermediate stage, we will tend to experience Imposter Syndrome where we know enough to know how much more there is to know making us underestimate ourselves.
At the advanced stage ("Experts"), we will tend to experience Curse of Knowledge where we know our own abilities but assume others have similar a similar background and knowledge causing communication gaps.
