Almost no one, probably, knows as much as they think they do. When put to the test, most people find that they cannot explain the meaning of words or concepts in everyday use, or of phenomena they believe they understand.
One of the main pitfalls of learning is to ignore what you ignore; when this happens people stop questioning, stop thinking critically, and stop listening to other points of view; they stop seeking their growth and development, because they don't know the limits of their true competence.
Something close to the delusional superiority syndrome to which we have referred in another article.
In a society where form is valued more than content, one can end up hiring or following the advice of a supposedly "incompetent" expert who appears to know a lot, making wrong decisions and achieving catastrophic results.
This is why, to paraphrase René Descartes, true experts would give everything they know for half of what they ignore.
In the 1970s, a psychologist named Noel Burch created a model to describe the stages of learning that people go through to learn a new skill. This model is known as "The Four Stages of Competence".
1. You don't know that you don't know
Unconscious Incompetence - Do you know your blind spot?
[ You are neither aware of the skill nor of your lack of proficiency ]
For example, you see someone else riding a bike, baking a cake, or creating a learning experience. Then you think, "Sounds simple, I can do that too!"
2. You know that you don't know
Conscious incompetence - Awareness
[ You are aware of the skill and its lack of proficiency ]
When you get on your bike and fall off, when your cake is unmemorable even by you, or when you run the first class of your course and achieve an 80% dropout rate, you begin to realize that it is harder than you thought and that in reality, you don't know how to do what you thought you knew.
3. You know that you know
Conscious Competence - Building Proficiency
[ You are able to use the skill, but only with effort ]
That's where the learning process starts, you know you don't know and you really want to learn; so you start studying and training, you put in the effort; you get on and off the bike several times; you make several cakes and study and understand the nuances of building a good learning experience. You come to build a conscious knowledge and a level of proficiency in building the results.
4. You don't know that you know
Unconscious Competence - Proficiency
[ You are able to use the skill automatically, without effort ].
After riding a bike for a long time, or baking many cakes, and designing numerous learning experiences, you come to integrate your knowledge into your conceptual framework in such a way that you are able to do things without even thinking about them or being able to explain them.
This framework is dynamic; knowledge creates and recreates itself, permanently renewing itself, demanding an enormous capacity for listening. You may think you know everything in an area of knowledge, but be sure that there is knowledge that you don't even know exists. So be humble and listen carefully to other points of view and experiences so as not to fall into the trap of ignoring what you ignore.
