Accidentally Incompetent: Cycling Around the Four Stages of Competence

I’ve recently been reading about the four stages of competence, reflecting on how you move between one and the other, and thinking about how this process is not linear at all, but rather a circular path. To celebrate my new (off-brand) Apple pencil, I started doodling.

There’s some ambiguity over the invention of the four stages, but they appear to have popped up in the 1960s in a book called “Management of Training Programs”. There are similarities with the Johari Window (known unknowns etc) but these four stages are focused specifically on ability, not knowledge.

As mentioned before, this is a circular path, not a one-directional arrow. We’d like to think that we just get better and better with experience, like a fine wine ageing in its cask but, when it comes to competency, it’s entirely possible to move between the stages in two directions.

Moving Positively Clockwise

• From Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence

This involves diagnosing the status quo, evaluating expectations and doing some form of gap analysis to work out what someone doesn’t know. By definition, it’s incredibly difficult to self-identify something that’s unconscious, so this requires leadership and peer input. This can be…