Purposive Drift

Consciously competent

Bob Sutton has been enthusing about a deli based business, Zingerman's:

"What I was most taken with, however, is that that Saginaw and Wienzweig have grown this business by focusing in the quality of their products and service, and on treating their employees very well, and treating profit as a secondary goal."

In his piece he links to articles in The New York Times and INC, which are both worth reading in full.

What caught my eye in the INC article as almost an aside talking about one of community of companies that make up Zingerman's training company ZingTrain was this bit about learning and teaching:   

"There's a concept taught in ZingTrain's seminars concerning the mastery of a skill. When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent -- that is, you don't know what you don't know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don't know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you're not even aware you're doing it.

Here's the kicker: in order to teach a skill, you have to go backward, from being unconsciously competent to being consciously competent. Until you can teach it, moreover, you don't really know what you know. That concept helps to explain the process Zingerman's went through that earned it a reputation for management equal to its reputation for food."

Is it necessary to be consciously competent to teach something? I'm not quite sure, but it is certainly something to think about.