Past assets - future liabilities..?
The subtle shift from competence to incompetence
“We know more than we can tell. We believe more than we can prove.” — Michael Polanyi
Creating a future-fit culture involves development of new attitudinal and behavioural muscles that bring the strength, grip, balance, and flexibility required to cultivate iterative sense making, decision making, and action taking throughout the organisation.
That’s not as easy as it sounds, because legacy tacit knowledge the organisation accumulated in the past gets in the way.
The term tacit knowledge was coined over 65 years ago by Professor Michael Polanyi, who highlighted the crucially different roles of focal awareness and subsidiary awareness, which he often illustrated using this metaphor:1
“When I use a hammer to drive in a nail, I attend to both nail and hammer, but in a different way.
I watch the effect of my strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively.
I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling of the hammer in the palm of my hand which is merged into the focal awareness of my driving in the nail.” 2
In common language, and in Polanyi’s terminology, the hammer is an example of a tool — an instrument we use to achieve an outcome, for example:
a hammer, a saw, a pressure washer
a potato peeler, a coffee grinder, a stick blender
a piano, a saxophone, a guitar
When we first pick up an unfamiliar tool it feels unwieldy, and our focal attention is drawn to how we hold and manipulate the tool.
We’re aware that we’re not very adept at using the tool — a stage often referred to as conscious incompetence. 3
But with persistence and practice, we become more skilled and reach the stage of conscious competence.
At this stage of skill development, we can now use the tool reasonably well, so long as we pay attention to how we use it.
With further experience of using the tool our level of mastery increases, and our original incompetence becomes an increasingly distant memory.
Eventually, we rarely recall ever having been incompetent, becoming capable of using the tool with great skill with little or no conscious thought.
This is the stage of unconscious competence.
In Polanyi’s terms, we have reached a stage where we have a subsidiary awareness of how the tool fits in our grasp and how we manipulate it, and this awareness is merged within the focal awareness of what we are achieving with the tool.
This merging results in a state of embodiment — where the self and the tool become combined “as one”.
As an example, consider what happens when we learn to drive.
Initially we’re faced with an array of controls — levers, pedals, steering wheel, etc — to which we need to pay conscious focused attention.
Over time, we master the combined use of these multiple dimensions of driving, eventually reaching the stage where we can drive without consciously thinking about shifting gears, turning the steering wheel, stepping on the brake pedal etc.
We may even arrive at our destination so automatically that we have to think back to recall which route we took when someone asks…
Another example of the embodiment of tool and user is when people like Brian May, Angus Young, or Pete Townshend pick up their guitars and play.
Musical maestros don’t have focal awareness on which fingers to put on which strings and frets. They learned how to do that years ago, and that learning has become subsumed into subsidiary awareness. Their focal awareness is on playing Bohemian Rhapsody, Thunderstruck, or Won’t Get Fooled Again.
In fact, if you drew their focal awareness onto the instrument mid-performance — for example by asking which strings and frets their fingers were on — they’d likely mess up the tune.
Polanyi recognised that just as we employ both focal awareness and subsidiary awareness when we use physical tools and instruments like hammers, cars, and guitars — we also employ both focal awareness and subsidiary awareness when we use subtle tools and instruments in our mental activities.
As we become experienced in using certain conceptual constructs, formulae, frameworks, models, methods etc, these become increasingly embodied and embedded as tacit knowledge in subsidiary awareness.
Our focal awareness becomes fully focused on the results we produce with increased skill and, eventually, unconscious competence.
Which is all well and good, until the context changes — and the conceptual constructs, formulae, frameworks, models, methods etc we’ve been using for so long that they’ve become deeply embodied, are no longer appropriate.
What was previously unconscious competence has now become unconscious incompetence — without us noticing the shift. We continue to see and do based on embodied ways of seeing and doing that have become natural — but no longer work.
One of the most significant challenges faced when creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is that so many of our default conceptual constructs, formulae, frameworks, models, methods, mindsets, attitudes, and behaviour are rooted in deeply embedded tacit knowledge that was only appropriate for the more certain, predictable times past when we acquired and embodied it.
While we weren’t paying (focal) attention, past assets became future liabilities that now stifle, smother, and strangle the emergence of the innovation, adaptiveness, and agility that characterise a future-fit culture.
Some aspects of outdated tacit knowledge that inhibit, undermine, and prevent the emergence of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness include:
‘Leadership’ = ‘top management’
‘Senior executive’ = ‘decision maker’
‘Decision maker’ = ‘leader’
‘Culture’ = ‘shared values’
‘Mainstream management consulting firm’ = ‘safe pair of hands’
‘Best practice’ = ‘low risk’
‘Digital transformation’ = ‘technology will save us’
“What gets measured gets done”
“Our people could never do that”
“You can’t change people’s mindsets”
“Culture change is complex, messy, and invariably fails”
Polanyi wrote his magnum opus Personal Knowledge over 65 years ago — but still today very few people grasp the vital importance of tacit knowledge.
That’s a big problem because much of an organisation’s culture — the way we do things round here — is embodied and embedded in tacit, as opposed to explicit, knowledge.
To gain a better grasp of what tacit knowledge is, how it develops, and how to work with it, I’d highly recommend Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge. 4
It’s densely packed with insights that you’ll find especially valuable if you suspect that aspects of past unconscious competence have become unconscious incompetence —without people in your organisation really noticing.
Polanyi was a Hungarian chemist who moved to the UK in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He held the chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester for 15 years before the university created a chair for him in his new passion, the social sciences, which he held from 1948 until 1958.
From Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi (p55) 1998 edition by Routledge - ISBN 9780415151498.
The Four Stages of Competence model.
Ibid.