The good news across all industries and business sectors is that leaders increasingly recognize the tremendous value of retraining workers for the digital workplace. As a recent Harvard Business Review article noted, “Any business can invest in advanced technologies, but creating a workforce that’s ready to use them is much harder.”
The bad news, however, is that as companies strive to upskill their workers to keep pace with advanced technologies, they continue to overlook the biggest impediment to learning at all levels. It’s a problem that affects people in as much as 20 to 40% of areas critical to their performance.
The problem is unconscious incompetence, which literally means that people are incompetent in some aspects of their job, but completely unaware. In other words, they believe they know something but, in fact, do not. Unconscious incompetence can undermine quality, customer satisfaction, and even safety.
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There are dramatic examples of unconscious incompetence and their tremendous toll. Three decades ago, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred at Chernobyl in the Ukraine due to flawed reactor design and inadequately trained personnel. In January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was torn apart 73 seconds after liftoff when the O-ring seals on the solid rocket boosters failed, despite assurances that the integrity of the rings would not be affected by the cold weather.
In the medical field, unconscious incompetence has been linked to preventable medical errors. The seminal report To Err Is Human examined the incidence of medical errors, which are a leading cause of death. Among the findings: knowledge of how to prevent some errors existed, but there has been a need for wider dissemination.
The only way to address unconscious incompetence is to systematically practice uncovering and addressing it as part of learning. Otherwise, what people assume to be accurate or appropriate (but, in fact, is the opposite) can keep them from acquiring the new knowledge and skills they need to compete in today’s technology-enabled workplace.
The Personalized Approach
The question then becomes how best to address unconscious incompetence and impart new skills. Traditional learning strategies, including static e-learning, are “one-size-fits-none” approaches that give everyone the same material with no personalization. An analogy I like to use is a person who goes to see a doctor with a health complaint but is told, “I’ll give you the medications and treatments that I have prescribed for the last 75 people. You go home and try them and see what works for you.” Of course, that would be ridiculous—and yet, that is essentially what education has traditionally done. Based on the experience of prior learners, assumptions are made about the needs of every learner.
Far better is a personalized approach tailored to each learner, which takes into account their varied backgrounds, experience, levels of technical skills, and unconscious incompetence in different aspects of their jobs. In 20-plus years of research and development of learning solutions, I have found that adaptive learning delivers a truly personalized approach. Adaptive learning is a broad term that means, in essence, a computer-based learning system that automatically adjusts to the needs of each learner. It comes close to emulating the one-to-one student and teacher interaction of a tutoring environment, but at a scale.
Advanced adaptive learning platforms use a short, closed loop communication where the learning is constantly validated or corrected through high frequency questions and tasks that probe the learners’ proficiency, knowledge gaps, and unconscious incompetence. Most important, these platforms can deliver the targeted support needed to build proficiency, such that every learner becomes competent.
In corporate learning and development (L&D), adaptive learning can completely change both the experience for individual learners and the outcomes they achieve. For too long, corporate L&D focused on course completion: People showed up, took a class, went to a conference, and got a pat on the back or a certificate of completion. But a piece of paper on the wall doesn’t mean that the information delivered in a class stays in one’s brain. Even more important than what people learn in short-term is how much they retain in the long-term.
What People Learn—and What They Forget
There is a problem with retention that has been well documented for more than a century. In the late 19th century, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, demonstrated what became known as Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve: Within the first 24 hours, Ebbinghaus found, 70 percent of newly acquired information cannot be recalled, and as much as 90 percent is lost within the first two weeks.
This brings us to another aspect of learning that companies must also address as part of their L&D strategies. Reinforcing knowledge and skills is one of the most impactful aspects of learning. It not only ensures retention but also helps prevent unconscious incompetence.
One area where knowledge refreshment and retention is critical is pilot training because of the obvious impact on safety involving hundreds of people per planeload. Most business environments, though, don’t have such life-or-death scenarios. Nonetheless, knowledge retention remains critical to ensuring success for people in all professions who are facing changing demands and escalating requirements for their jobs.
Retention, just like learning, must be individualized.
Engaging Learners in the Process
By viewing learners as individuals with different experiences, knowledge, skills, and approaches to learning, adaptive learning is far more effective in getting the job done. Learning becomes more than a requirement—it’s highly motivating as a process of self-improvement and empowerment for lifelong employment.
As people are exposed to new knowledge and skills, they also become aware of their unconscious incompetence. When their erroneous assumptions about what they know is addressed, a higher baseline of knowledge is established. This becomes a firm foundation on which to build the advanced and higher-level knowledge and skills needed for a more successful future.
