Before there is Conscious Incompetence, there is Unconscious incompetence — the initial, passive, state in the InsideWork Change Engine. When we are Unconsciously Incompetent we don’t know what we don’t know. There is a certain bliss to this ignorance. Things are going fine. There is no felt need for change. Unconscious Incompetence is interrupted when our attention is drawn by some catalytic experience — it could be anything — to realize we may have missed something…

The legendary computer scientist Alan Kay wrote: “Some years ago, Marvin Minsky said, ‘You don’t understand something until you understand it more than one way.’ I think that what we’re going to have to learn is the notion that we have to have multiple points of view.” Kay recalls, “At PARC we had a slogan: ‘Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.’”

That’s what exposing ourselves and our companies to new perspectives provides: 80 IQ points. Who couldn’t use an additional 80 IQ points?

• Why not read books and magazines and web content outside our fields?
• Why not travel from time to time?
• Why not have lunch with surprising people?
• Why not watch movies and plays and take silent retreats and practice journaling and, every once in a while, take a different route to work?
• Why not ask more questions and listen more carefully?
• Why not carve out time to learn a new skill that enhances capabilities beyond what we’re known for?

Any of these intentional acts might reveal something we hadn’t seen, might trip a hidden switch, might cause us to look up where we usually look down, might expose us to something we didn’t know we didn’t know. And exposure is the threshold into the state of Conscious Incompetence where we know we don’t know.

Crossing that threshold does not in any way supply sudden, global insight into everything we don’t know. It simply means we’ve become aware of a blind spot.

Which is why Conscious Incompetence does not always present itself as good news. It is after all a realization that we are not as clever as we thought. This is seldom greeted as a positive development.

Conscious Incompetence may be, as the Oxford American Dictionary suggests, a state of undue self-awareness. People in the organization may be embarrassed by the magnitude of the ignorance that has come to light. They may feel overwhelmed, maybe defensive, perhaps vulnerable. They may wonder, What else don’t we know? They may think Someone should be held accountable for this — we should have known this!

This is why the InsideWork Change Engine is useful: If the Change Engine is in play, someone in the organization will say, So we found out something we don’t know…So what?

And when that bright person poses that bright question a door swings open and the company is positioned for a move into the future.

That move comprises two intentional steps: Assessment and Action.

Intentional Assessment is important because newness does not, in and of itself, make a skill or capacity worth pursuing. Taking the trouble to learn what the organization now knows it didn’t know may or may not be worth the effort. In fact, the learning curve may be a distraction from what really matters. It may contribute to mission drift — unintentionally wandering off course — and might even lead to an outright hijacking of a company’s true mission.

Don’t bother adding the new competence if your assessment demonstrates learning this new thing:

• clearly distracts from your core purposes (and isn’t significant enough to be added to that list)
• is unnecessary because a business partner already possesses the knowledge and is willing to share
• is ethically questionable
• will cost more than it can be reasonably projected to return

If a thorough assessment rules something out, the attention you would have expended to add that capability is instead freed up to recognize some other new category of Unconscious Incompetence (all you lack is the right catalyst).

And if your assessment shows that learning something new might secure the company’s survival, or at least improve the bottom line? If you have the capacity, it seems like a no-brainer to move on to Intentional Action.

At this stage, there is, broadly speaking, no place for words like someone should: Someone should learn this.

It’s not going out on a limb to say that learning organizations have a bias for action. Unlike more haphazard organizations, their action in responding to Conscious Incompetence is intentional and sustained.

Of course, some things require very little to learn if the right people are in place:

On Tue, at 10:29 AM, Bernard wrote:

do you guys check the spam filter regularly?  just asking since i found one normal comment just now.

On Tue, at 10:42 AM, Sam wrote:

I check it about every 10 days or so, but not methodically.
/sam

Oh, and I went ahead and de-spammed that one comment.

On Tue, at 1:54 PM, Jim wrote:

Good catch Bernard. Thanks.

Sam, can we get a weekly scan into the schedule? I assume as comments increase, the chances go up that the filter will catch a good comment from time to time.

Anything about the comment Bernard found that might help us adjust the rules a little? jh

On Tue, at 2:10 PM, Sam wrote:

Sure we can do a weekly scan.  Bernard or Peter, would either of you want to do that?  I can just set up a weekly event on the calendar and have it send an e-mail reminder.

The spam filters work from a centralized database. Marking it as non-spam will send it back to that database to be considered as non-spam, and hopefully make it less likely that false-positives get caught in the future.
/sam

On Tue, at 2:14 PM, Jim wrote:

How about we divide it by four… That’s pretty low impact. jh

On Tue, at 5:12 PM, Bernard wrote:

sure. maybe alternate each week between us?

calendar would be great. thanks.

This wasn’t the sort of Conscious Incompetence that requires a study group or project team to identify and solve. Bernard, Sam and Jim weighed in with two emails each from three different cities (Peter followed the thread but had nothing to add). The emails spread over several hours, but the combined attention was measured in minutes. It took longer to describe the process here than to put it in play that Tuesday.

Other times it’s a lot harder than that… Sometimes Conscious Incompetence reveals a flaw (or highlights an opportunity) that calls for a more complicated response. Again, Somebody should do something is inadequate. What’s required is an exchange that covers at least these bases:

• What (if any) difference is there between the presenting issue and the underlying problem or opportunity?
• What will it take to design our way into this opportunity or out of this threat?
• How will the resources (time, talent, space, equipment, supplies, travel, design, prototyping, testing, rollout…) be allocated?
• In what form will the solution become part of the organization’s skill, knowledge and practice?
• What are the metrics for bringing the learning process to completion?
• Who owns it?

Putting all this together so far…

Unconscious Incompetence is a state of unlimited possibility because an organization may get a wake-up call at any moment.

Conscious Incompetence is a state of opportunity because an organization can reaffirm priorities by taking a pass on something that could be a distraction from the core mission, or it can be mobilized to intentional assessment and targeted action to solve a problem or seize an opportunity that was, until recently, hidden.

In the latter case, the organization will, over time, turn Conscious Incompetence into a state of Conscious Competence. And the learning cycle continues…

Next in the series: Conscious Competence