By Wesley Harris
Years ago, former Louisiana Tech softball coach Mark Montgomery gave me a simple lesson about learning.
I had heard the concept before, although in much more complex academic terms during the psychology courses for my master’s degree in supervision at Tech. It is known as the Four Stages of Competence.
The coach reduced the first stage to a sentence I have never forgotten:
“They don’t know that they don’t know.”
He was talking about the new athletes arriving on campus each year. He had recruited them because he saw the potential for greatness. They were talented, athletic and among the best players to come out of their high schools and even their states. They had the physical tools to become outstanding college athletes.
But many were still raw.
They had succeeded largely on athletic ability without yet developing a complete understanding of the game. At the collegiate level, there was much more to learn — strategy, preparation, conditioning, discipline and the mental side of competition.
The interesting part was that most of them didn’t realize how much they had left to learn.
They didn’t know that they didn’t know.
The coach saw that as the first challenge for his staff. Before they could develop the potential that had prompted him to recruit those athletes in the first place, the coaches had to help them recognize that talent alone wasn’t enough. Another level of understanding was required to become the players he believed they could be.
That first stage, they don’t know that they don’t know, is formally called unconscious incompetence.
The remaining stages can be expressed just as simply:
They know that they don’t know — conscious incompetence. This second stage may be uncomfortable, but it represents real progress. Once we recognize what we don’t know, we can begin learning.
They know that they know — conscious competence. At the third stage, we have developed the knowledge or skill, but using it still requires conscious effort. We have to think about what we’re doing.
They don’t know that they know — unconscious competence. By the fourth stage, experience and repetition have made use of that knowledge almost automatic. We no longer have to consciously work through every step. The correct response comes naturally, and decision-making is quicker.
The coach was talking about athletes, but the lesson applies to almost everything we do.
A word of advice for leaders
If you supervise, teach, coach or mentor others, remember people cannot improve a weakness they don’t recognize.
The first responsibility isn’t necessarily to provide an answer. Sometimes it is simply to help someone see there is more to learn. Maybe much more.
That doesn’t require embarrassing them or proving how much more the leader knows. The coach hadn’t recruited those athletes because of what they lacked. He recruited them because of what he believed they could become.
That’s an important distinction for any leader.
Recognizing someone’s shortcomings and recognizing their potential aren’t opposites. Good leadership requires seeing both at the same time.
The goal is awareness: helping people recognize the distance between where they are and where they could be, then helping them close it.
And a word of advice for ourselves
The lesson becomes more difficult when we turn it around.
Success can convince us we know more than we do. Experience can do the same. I saw it over and over in my profession.
We develop routines. We become comfortable, so comfortable that we don’t question whether those routines are the best way to perform. We don’t seek to learn whether our routines are obsolete.
If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always gotten.
That’s when the former coach’s words become especially useful.
Every so often, we should ask ourselves:
What don’t I know that I don’t know?
It’s an impossible question to answer completely. That’s the point.
It reminds us to listen, ask questions, seek more knowledge, accept constructive criticism and remain curious. Most importantly, it reminds us to remain teachable and agile enough to change.
The four stages aren’t simply a path from being bad at something to being good at it. They are a reminder that learning begins with recognizing the limits of our own knowledge.
Those incoming college athletes were already talented. Coach Montgomery knew that when he recruited them.
What they didn’t yet know was how much more they could become.
