The transformation curve describes how people learn. At the beginning of a learning cycle, people do not know what they do not know. They are in the phase of unconscious incompetence. Real learning happens when people become aware that they have not mastered something, i.e. they enter a phase of conscious incompetence.
This kind of learning presupposes an active, reflective engagement with concrete experiences. Problematic situations, the overcoming of which represents a challenge, are the origin of learning processes. In other words: there is no learning without tensions!
However, we do not like such situations. When something arrives that we don’t understand, we feel insecure. Our first reflex is then to want to know and understand. Applied to leadership, this means we consult experts and rely on numbers for guidance. This calms us down – and supposedly brings us into a state of conscious competence.
However, this reflex leads astray, because we are now back at the beginning of the process: we do not know what we do not know. Learning is not possible in this way. We have to endure being consciously incompetent. Only then do we have the space to think about why such and similar problem situations arise again and again in everyday life.
When we move to this meta-level, we experience new space for solutions. This leads to instructive insights and to an expansion of the behavioral spectrum of a person or a team for the future. The quality of the results of a system is always based on the quality of the people who form this system.
From the conscious confrontation with tensions and the experience that their resolution becomes an enriching experience, people enter into unconscious competence: you don’t really have an idea of what happened, but it works!
At the beginning, the new actions are not yet instinctive, not yet anchored in us as a routine. Over time, however, the new ways of seeing things prove useful and we implement what we have learned into our lives as a matter of course. We enter the phase of conscious competence, but differently from the direct knowledge path: the new experiences expand our behavioral scope.
This opens up new resources. Self-confidence grows, one looks to the future with more confidence and positive expectations, and experiences oneself as more capable of acting. And all this only because we executives have resisted our urge to want to know.
Utilisation
Draw the curve with your team, explain it and ask everyone:
- where they are currently situated and
- why.
Due to this discussion, a positive team dynamic usually develops, where one can learn from mistakes and grow together.
Sources
Fredrickson, BL (2004):
The broaden-and-build-theory of positive emotions. The Royal Society. Published online 17th of August.
Kolb, D.: (1984):
Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
Kres, M. (2017):
Mutmacher: Unternehmen stärken durch mutige Führung. 3. Aufl. Wiesbaden, SpringerGabler. S. 63ff.