The Four States of Competence, and Their Connection to Presenting Online
photo by Hasan Albari
For some of you, presenting online may still feel like a relatively new medium, and one that you may not like, nor were you trained in school (or maybe even early in your careers) to present online. For others, presenting online has become a part of your everyday routine. You may remember feeling like the sudden shift to presenting online felt uncomfortable and awkward at first. There are a few pieces of good news, though. First, people were generally patient and understanding as we all learned this new medium (this was when the “You’re on mute, Gina” was still amusing…it may not be by now!). While this patience will not last forever, it did buy you time to master this domain. The second piece of good news is that when you do master online presentations, you will stand out from the crowd. You can quickly gain visibility and display mastery if you approach learning in a certain way. This post is designed to provide you with some critical information that will help you master the domain more quickly and captivate those who attend your presentations. And if you are a seasoned online presenter and are reading this post, kudos to you for devoting time and attention to it! We encourage you to take this opportunity to evaluate what you may want to continue focusing on.
In this post, we explore one model that helped us better understand the process we have gone through to improve our online presentation skills. We hope you find this content enlightening and we hope you see yourself in the model.
The four states of competence model is the work of Noel Burch. Originally called The Four Stages of Learning Any New Skill, Burch designed the model in the 1970s (1). According to the model, there are four states of competence and when you think about any skill you have ever learned, like driving, the piano, a video game, or public speaking, his work has a lot of face validity. In other words, it just makes sense. The dimensions of this model include the following:
1. Unconscious Incompetence (UI). Unconscious Incompetence means that you do not know what you do not know. From a presentation perspective, this is a speaker who uses too many space fillers or vocal fry and has never even been exposed to these concepts. For those of you who learned about technology in Chapter 4 of our book, or from our earlier blog posts, it’s likely you had never heard of a “ring light” or a “soft box”; in other words, you were blissfully in a UI space.
2. Conscious Incompetence (CI). Conscious Incompetence means that the learner is acutely aware of how far they have to go before displaying mastery. Returning to Chapter 4 and earlier blog posts about technology, some of our interviewees told us that they felt a little overwhelmed by all they need to know about technology when the pandemic began. In the context of speaking online, CI occurs after an individual has learned the concepts of vocal fry or upspeak and then “sees” themself using those concepts during a video analysis session with a coach. The individual knows the concepts and is aware of the gap between their current skills and a desired future state.
3. Conscious Competence (CC). Conscious Competence means that if our fictitious online presenter engages in deliberate practice and concentrates really hard, they can begin to minimize the number of space fillers, vocal fry, and upspeak. However, it takes a lot of concentration and is not yet at a place of automaticity. CC requires feedback—from a coach or a peer.
4. Unconscious Competence (UC). Unconscious Competence happens after significant practice—oftentimes with the guidance of a coach or mentor. At this point, our example presenter has worked hard to eliminate vocal fry, upspeak, and space fillers over a period of time and no longer needs to think about any of these concepts. The area of development has been fixed or occurs rarely. And while the speaker has progressed in these three areas, they are likely at a place of unconscious incompetence on other, more advanced topics like comedic timing, or advanced storytelling.
Each of you reading this post, and we as authors, are moving along the states of competence on any number of different topics—just within this one domain of online presentations! So be patient, prioritize your areas of improvement, and engage in deliberate practice to help expedite your progress through the states of competence!
References
Csabai, M. (2015, November 25). 4 stages of learning anything. https://mindinmotion.co.za/4-stages-of-learning-anything/
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We explore this topic and others in our new book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design.