The stages of competence

Sat in the driver’s seat of a 1985 registered Fiesta diesel (I got the year wrong in the video), my driving instructor Roy, was starting to explain what he needed from me.

To not crash his car (obvs).

To do the homework he gave me.

To always speak out loud what I was thinking as I made a driving decision.

That last one has stuck with me since the two of us were squashed into that C plate Ford.

I mean, I’m not short and he had padding.

And a Fiesta back then was not a big car.

I did love driving it though - a really easy car to drive.

Anyway, back to the story…

Having to say out loud what was going on in my head may seem a bit weird, but it made me very aware of what I was doing and what I was about to do.

It helped me to spot patterns in my driving, and when I was doing something not meant to be on the agenda, it was able to be corrected, because he knew what I was thinking.

Of course, as a 17 year old you don’t think about how there might actually be something teachable in all of that, but now as *cough* someone much older, it’s pretty obvious.

In fact, it fits beautifully with a model called “the four stages of competence”.

You start with unconscious incompetence - you don’t know, what you don’t know.

Then you move to conscious incompetence where you start to become aware of what you don’t know.

Then there’s conscious competence, where you understand how to do something, and you are aware of it.

Finally, unconscious competence, the autopilot stage, when a skill or task becomes second nature.

The usual example of stage four is driving, where you have no recollection of the majority of a journey, yet you got there perfectly safely.

What my driving instructor was doing back in the day, was bringing a lot of the thoughts I was having and make them conscious.

And that is a really useful place to be.

However there is a fifth stage in all of this, which makes it even cooler - conscious unconscious competence.

Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but this is the place that a lot of people go when they are teaching skills.

I’ve seen a lot of that in my healthcare days.

Experienced practitioners taking a skill and talking through what they are thinking as they are doing it.

Coaches knowing what questions to ask and speaking their thoughts in the moment.

It’s really cool stuff, because is helps you teach people much better and it makes you question exactly what you are doing at each stage to make sure your actions are in alignment with your intention.

Some of the best teachers and leaders I’ve come across over the years have been great at this.

And yes, that definitely includes my driving instructor.