Beyond unconsciously competent Pt.1: Now what?

Like many of you, for a number of years I’ve been using the Four Stages of Competence model to make various points during sessions. There is nothing wrong with that except it doesn’t help to answer the question “What happens next”?

In the model, you move through the phases as follows:

• Unconscious Incompetence – you don’t know what you don’t know
• Conscious Incompetence – you know what you don’t know
• Conscious Competence – you know what you know but need to think about it
  
• Unconscious Competence – you know what you know and don’t need to think about it

But then what?
What happens when your knowledge of how to do something becomes automatic?

How do you get better?

In his book “Flow – The psychology of optimal experience” Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Pronounced “Chicks send me high” according to the Professor!) offers an interesting alternative which covers the “so what next” aspect of learning.

But before we get to that we need to think about what we mean by Flow and interpret it for the training room.

Can you recall a time when you were so engrossed with what you were doing and so loving the experience that you didn’t notice the passage of time?  You were totally focused, challenged but comfortable with the level of challenge, really enjoying the feelings that this experience was giving you, every modality tuned to the task at hand.

In simple terms this is what Csikszentmihalyi is referring to as “being in flow.”

Flow is that state where time stands still. Hours may pass but you are unaware of their passing. And you get a feeling of deep enjoyment from the experience to the extent that you may feel sadness when it stops.

Csikszentmihalyi says in his opening chapter:

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

Now imagine we could get our learners into flow to create an optimal learning experience. What would that mean for them? What would it mean for their learning and the transfer of that learning into their lives?

Here is the diagram that Csikszentmihalyi uses on page 74 where he talks about flow and learning:

We must find the balance between our learner’s levels of skill and the degree of challenge that we offer them. Getting learners into flow is about designing sessions that acknowledges their current levels of skill and pushes them just hard enough to get them into flow.

Someone once said to me:

Its like I knew what I was doing but I didn’t. But that was OK – actually it felt great

In other words they were using their existing knowledge but had to stretch it to another level in order to achieve the task at hand. Sounds a lot like they were learning to me!

In the next instalment we will look at how this “In Flow” diagram can help us to answer the question that the “Four Stages of Competence” model can’t.

“What happens next?”

question mark image by Oberazzi

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