How Facilitated Leadership Can Help You Overcome 7 Common Project Pitfalls

Facilitative leadership provides the best assurance that team leads/ project managers can overcome project pitfalls.  Borrowing from the PMBoK (ie, Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge) and other published sources, following are seven of the most common project pitfalls. A discussion about each follows below.

Using Facilitative Leadership
To Overcome Project Management Pitfalls

7 Project Pitfalls

1. Abandonment of Planning
2. Feature (Scope) Creep
3. Omitting Necessary Tasks
4. Overly Optimistic Schedule
5. Suboptimal Requirements Definition
6. Underestimating Testing
7. Weak Team

Abandonment of Planning 

Do not abandon your plan or the planning effort. No matter how proactive you are, some contributors will under perform, customers will request changes, and technical issues will prevent you from delivering some features on time. It’s not a question of “if” but “when”. As soon as you start to deviate from your plan, intelligently refactor, but stick to it. Never abandon your plan.

Feature (Scope) Creep

As time goes on, customers learn more about their needs and they come up with new features and ways of improving existing ones. Don’t let these changes throw your project plan out of control. Gather the feedback, analyze it, prioritize it, document it, and schedule the changes as mutually agreed upon. You’re not going to build the perfect product in one release. Deliver on your existing commitments, and try to facilitate deeper understanding about many the change requests. Omissions can be quite costly, so don’t immediately discount the value of understanding.

Omitting Necessary Tasks 

A project schedule should not simply comprise the tasks required to develop product and process features. It should also include other derivative activities, such as interacting with customers, writing detailed functional specifications, and receiving technical training. Team-support activities cannot be skipped and therefore should not be ignored when baselining a project schedule.

Overly Optimistic Schedule

Meeting schedules should be aggressive, yet realistic. Demanding an overly optimistic schedule greatly reduces your chance of completing a project on time. Be aggressive with your plan, but remain realistic.

“Even particularly smart people in extremely high-performing situations will consistently underestimate how much time it takes to complete certain tasks.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize

Suboptimal Requirements Definition

While showing illusional progress, coding before requirements gathering actually delays project completions. Spending time early refining requirements can save weeks later on.

Underestimating Testing 

Project tend to underestimate how much effort is required to test a major release. As a rule of thumb, one-third of the entire project should be spent testing and fixing defects for major releases. Consensual understanding of test results and implications is key to stakeholder ownership.

Weak Team

Various resources claim that there is as much as a ten-to-one efficiency ratio between top performers and mediocre ones. Second-rate members contribute to project failures in many ways. They deliver late, do stuff that doesn’t support the project, and allow defects in their work that lacks the level of quality deemed acceptable by you and other stakeholders. Select your team members carefully. At the end of the day, even the best project manager can’t succeed with a weak team.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• Combining APM, PMI and PRINCE2 into a Holistic Approach to Project Management? (jamkib.wordpress.com)
• How to become a Jedi project manager (careeradvisor123.com)
• The Role of the Project Manager (agilityloop.com)
• How to Build a Roles and Responsibility Matrix for Multiple Sites (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)

15 Fun and Quick Tips to Help You Become a More Successful Facilitative Leader

1. “The wisdom of the crowd” effect has long been recognized, but scientists have gone further by showing that the strategy works even when the crowd consists of one person (Scientific American Mind, pg 14, Oct-Nov 2008).
   

   Fun Facts

2. Brain research on Buddhist monks seems to indicate that “HOW” you think, not “WHAT” you think about, improves brain activity (The Futurist, pg 36, Sep-Oct 2007).
3. Decision-making is important because making a decision signifies the beginning of activity, and the value of consensus derives from harmonized activities.
4. Everest in Tibetan is Qomocangma (pronounced, CHO MOL UNG MA) and in Nepalese is Sagaratha.
5. Extract more value from interactions:  Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities.  As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—namely, tacit interactions. By 2015 expect employment among jobs primarily involving tacit interactions to account for nearly one-half of total USA employment.  By 2020, Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.
6. Facilitating through video or telepresence involves three considerations not found when facilitating audio only meetings, namely:
   a. Clothing; for example, stripes or patterned shirts are not recommended during a videoconference and may not display well at the remote site(s).
   b. Plain colored shirts and pants/skirts are optimal.  Also, avoid wearing white and red.
   c. Restrict movement as much as possible.  Excessive movements are disruptive to viewers at the far site(s). Have a back up plan for your meeting or class in the event of connection failures or equipment problems.
7. Howard Gardner (Harvard University) has introduced two more types of innate intelligence, bringing his documented total to nine:
   a. Existential Intelligence—Sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence, such as the meaning of life, why do we die, and how did we get here.
   b. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”)
8. Instead of deBono’s Thinking Hats approach, consider assigning people or groups to emulate other famous people (eg; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mahatma Ghandi, Michelle Obama, etc) or collections (eg; ant colonies, weather, monastery, mafia, etc) and ask the group—“How would this person or collection address the problem at hand?”
9. Marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work on the theory of evolution, we are reminded NOT the strongest of the species survives, NOR the most intelligent; rather, “the one most responsive to change.”
10. Note the irony: “I’ll see it when I can believe it.”
11. Parsimony:  The Golden Rule is only 11 words
12. Research shows that innovation won’t happen without a diverse work force.  So, don’t clone yourself.
13. The only qualification for innovation is having been five years old.  On average, a five year old laughs 100 times per day while the 44 year old laughs only eleven times per day.
14. The original Palm Pilot had only four features: tasks, calendar, contacts, and memos.
15. The single most powerful word in negotiations is “HUH?”  It says, “tell me more”, without offering rejection or objection.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• Three Questions You Need to Answer Before Your Meeting Begins (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Help Your Meeting Participants Become Better Listeners (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)

Taking Charge of Poorly Led Meetings When You are Not the Leader

We are not suggesting that you take over lame meetings but there are some things you can do to improve the meeting without stepping on the toes of the meeting leader.

Situation

The situation is this: You are attending a meeting. It is failing because the leader has neglected some or many of the rules of good meeting management. What can you do?

Everyone is Sitting

Taking Charge

If all participants, including the leader, are sitting down, take a marker and stand up. Suggest to the leader that you can help by assisting in recording what is happening. Try to summarize what seems to be the purpose and direction (for lack of an agenda) of the meeting. You may even propose an agenda to finish the meeting. At that point, unless you are told to sit down and shut up, you become a facilitator. When appropriate, you may introduce your opinions, violating neutrality, but by standing up, recording on flip charts, and using facilitation skills to keep the discussion focused, you have effectively taken over using a consultative leadership style.

Leader is Standing

If the meeting leader is standing up, start by using facilitator skills, such as active listening, to get the group focused. If the leader is not effective in leading, this will not be a problem. Once you gain a role as a “focuser”, you may suggest to the leader that an agenda would help you understand the direction better (playing “dumb” is very effective in getting people to set direction without feeling threatened by you). You may suggest to the leader that he or she has so much to contribute, that you would be willing to stand up and do the flip chart recording.  Once you are up with a marker in your hand, you become the facilitator.

In both cases, talk to the meeting leader after the meeting, in a non-threatening way, about how the next meeting can be made more effective.  You will begin to change the culture in your organization.

Summary

If you can get to be the only person standing and have a marker in your hand, you can take over a meeting by using facilitator skills. Keep these rules in mind though:

• NEVER embarrass the leader
• NEVER challenge the leader’s capabilities
• It is NOT your meeting, you are only trying to help
• If the leader resists your efforts, stop

For You

If meetings are run well, you will enjoy the meetings that you attend more.  This is important because your attitude about your job will improve—even if it is good now. You should find:

• Your time in meetings will not be wasted or unproductive—you will feel like you are accomplishing something.
• People will look to you as a model of meeting management—and management in general. Senior executives find future executives in meetings—those who contribute and manage the meetings best.

For Your Company

Even if you don’t change your entire company, changing one organization within the company benefits a great deal. In organizations where productive meetings are a way of life, they are able to do things others have not been able to do, such as:

• Assure higher team participation and ownership
• Better align planning practices with strategic goals
• Complete projects/ programs correctly, on-time, and within budget
• Implement teams that generate high-impact

Revolution or Evolution

Look at your meeting culture and obstacles. Have poor meetings become an epidemic and people are openly complaining? If so, revolution may be the answer. Change the next meeting and let everyone know about it. Publish the fact that you are running the meeting in a totally new way. Publish the results of the meeting. Ask the attendees to answer—how was it better, how was it more productive? Publish results and suggest that such results can be achieved on a consistent basis if more meetings were conducted properly.

If your organization is not having major problems follow an evolutionary approach. Change the next meeting you run—even a short staff meeting.  Talk to your peers and subordinates about the meeting approach. Suggest changes to the ways meetings can be held. See if there is an interest in getting more people trained to run better meetings. Publish the benefits of better meeting leadership.

Example is Best

People see you succeeding at meetings and they want to try what you have been doing. The more people that do better, the more others will want to follow suit, and follow you. Set the example and expect others to follow.

Until next week, continue to fortify your skill set with tools and improvement suggestions available in many of our prior postings.

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• The Shift From Chief Executive To Chief Influencer (fastcompany.com)
• A Meeting Participants’ Credo (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Facilitate Three Actions We Take Next (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Facilitate Business Process Improvement: A Proven Approach Using Teams (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Mission or Vision – What is the Difference? (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• 3 Ways to Keep Meetings Short (Every Time) (inc.com)
• How smart leaders keep meetings on track (cbsnews.com)

Facilitators are More Popular than Dictators: Google Ngram Viewer

 

War or Peace

“Brain Breaks” and other mental stimulation are valuable for increasing group performance as measured by the velocity and innovativeness of ideas. Use Google’s Ngram Viewer as a way to stimulate group energy, teambuilding, and topic related discussion—all at the same time.

Simply turn your browser to http://books.google.com/ngrams and insert two comma separated phrases or terms to compare their occurrence in published English language books over the past 200 years.

For example, in the chart and result above, we compared the occurrences of the terms ‘war’ and ‘peace.’  As you can tell, the use of both terms are on a decline, amplifying the many shades of grey that exist between these two end states. The term ‘war’ remains largely prevalent and the term ’peace’ experienced a slight rise during the Viet-Nam conflict era, the 70’s.

Facilitator vs Dictator

Comparing the term ‘facilitator’ with ‘dictator’ we surprisingly discover that the term ‘facilitator’ become more popular (as measured by frequency of use) around 1995 and the trend appears to be increasing. The message is clear. If you want to be more popular, be a facilitator and not a dictator! Oh well, have some fun on your own, and help get participants back from breaks and lunch in a timely fashion with this tool. For other “Brain Breaks” do not forget to access your FAST alumni resources.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs)

Related articles

• Fun with Google Books Ngram Viewer (householdopera.typepad.com)
• ngram.sh: a script for extracting Google Ngram data (opendna.com)
• How to Facilitate Three Actions We Take Next (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• On Being Neutral – Take Only Photographs, Leave Only Bubbles (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Google Labs’ NGram Viewer: what we learned from 5 million books (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Live post: In search of the first use of ‘Data/Information Visualization’ (visualisingdata.com)
• How not to do things with words. (tedunderwood.wordpress.com)

 

Information is Physical — The Information (a brief review of James Gleick’s treatise)

Information is Physical “To do anything requires energy.  To specify what is done requires information.” -Seth Lloyd (2006) c/o James Gleick

“The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood” released by First Vintage Books in march 2012, and written by James Gleick © 2011, will leave you exhilarated with the implications of information as a thing, and exhausted at understanding the implications of information as another dimension, much like length, width, and height. This highly acclaimed and best selling author has probably forgotten more about this topic than this author is capable of restating, but his work is definitely worth a read.

For me, I was quite awakened to the understanding that the term itself is dynamic—notice “in – formation.” No wonder that the requirements and technology to support it, are never static and constantly changing. His discussion about the history and evolution towards the current state of quantum computing is remarkably clear yet simply challenging. Who can honestly explain teleportation cleanly and clearly to someone else. Yet most of us know and would agree with the Einsteinian equation “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

The Information (a book by James Gleick)

For me, particularly enjoyable was the chapter on Wikipedia, since it represent the true sense of digital collaboration. It also represents consensus, except for the disambiguations, or areas void of clear consensus.

From early Charles Babbage and “no thought can perish” to the edit wars of Wikipedia, if you are regularly engaged in the sphere of information technology, you will find Glieck’s book worthwhile at least, and at most, highly illuminating. After all, which is more accurate—is a human with a cat its “owner,” its “caregiver,” its “human companion,” or other? Or, to borrow liberally from Glieck’s painstaking research “factions fission into . . . the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists.” (for real).

His Prologue of references and Bibliography alone are worthy of any library, including yours, if part of your life’s passion deals with information technology.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• Future Facilitative Leadership Factors (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Facilitate Virtual Meetings: Teleconference and VideoPresence (Part 3 of 3 – Conclusion) (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• The Role of Session Leader (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Facilitate a Consensual Sphere of Concern, Influence, and Control Using the Bookend Method (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Babbage: April 4th 2012 (economist.com)
• Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012 (wikimedia.org)
• Alan Turing name-checks his predecessor Charles Babbage (wired.com)
• James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (ritholtz.com)

The Role of Session Leader

You can complete a project without facilitation, but you could also cut your own hair.
—Various

Session Leader

You have a multitude of tasks to perform during the workshop.  Success of the facilitator’s effort is dependent upon your skill, knowledge, and abilities as a session leader.  The session leader’s role includes both the traditional role of “Facilitator” discussed below and the role of “Methodologist” discussed on the next page.

Responsibilities

Context is the key responsibility of the session leader, frequently called a facilitator—responsibilities include:

• Actively listening to the discussion and challenging assumptions.
• Creating synergy by focusing the group and using your facilitation skills to enhance communications.
• Ensuring that all participants have an opportunity to participate.
• Explaining and enforcing the roles.
• Keeping the group on track.
• Managing the documenters and the documentation process.
• Observing the group interactions and adjusting when necessary.
• Questioning to achieve clarity—aiding communication between participants and yourself.
• Recognizing disruptive behavior and creating positive corrections.
• Working to resolve conflicts that arise.

Key Element

Your role is to create an environment where every participant has the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, and excel.  Observing the team’s progress helps you understand the dynamics of the group and how your approach enhances or detracts from the final output.

The Group Dynamics

• Ask yourself the following questions while observing the group:
• How do they communicate?  Eye to eye contact?  Soft spoken?  Yelling?  Gestures?  etc.
• In what order do they speak?  Primary, secondary, who backs who up?  Who always gets interrupted?
• Who appears to influence group direction the most?
• Who are these people talking to?  Are they looking for supporters?  Do they attack certain people or groups?

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• Facilitate Meaning, Not Words (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Facilitate Brainstorming (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Five Ways to Facilitate Quiet People and Get Them to Participate More Fully (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to (Not) Gesture while Facilitating (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Considerations on How to Facilitate between Europeans and Asians (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• 15 Fun and Quick Tips to Help You Become a More Successful Facilitative Leader (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)

 

Bad Predictions for Science and Technology

One of the biggest challenges with facilitation is to build consensus about a future state.  In a light-hearted sense, as we approach the holiday season, here are some statements that  likely garnered some respect along the way—albeit short-lived.

Get Out of the Box

• “Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.” Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, AD 10.
• “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bell, 1876.
• “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.” Albert Einstein’s teacher to his father, 1895.
• “I have anticipated [radio’s] complete disappearance — confident that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue themselves to ‘listening-in’ will soon find a better pastime for their leisure.” H.G. Wells, The Way the World is Going, 1925.
• “The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” The New York Times, after a prototype television was demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair.
• “It would appear we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements; they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.” Computer scientist John von Neumann, 1949.
• “Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances.” Radio pioneer Lee De Forest, 1957.
• “Despite the trend to compactness and lower costs, it is unlikely everyone will have his own computer any time soon.” Reporter Stanley Penn, The Wall Street Journal, 1966.
• “But what is [the microchip] good for?” Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968.
• “I predict the Internet…will go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld, 1995

These were first compiled by Laura Lee and published in The Futurist, September-October 2000,  For structured facilitation support, see your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST Professional Facilitative Leadership training  session offered around the world (see http://www.mgrush.com/ for a current schedule).

Related articles

• Bad Predictions for Science and Technology (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• George Dyson’s history of the computer: Turing’s Cathedral (boingboing.net)
• Five Reasons to Hold a Facilitated Session (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson (guardian.co.uk)
• Quantum Theory: von Neumann vs. Dirac (plato.stanford.edu)

Let’s Be Thankful—Where We Are Winning

We post our blog regularly every Thursday.  Since today is Thanksgiving, we thought we’d share some positive and thankful information.  Keep in mind that “information” means to be in formation (ie, akin to work in progress).

Using a Delphi panel and research method over 15 years, the Millennium Project has identified hundreds of indicators of humanity’s progress or regress.  Since you will no doubt be exposed to some of the negative factors reading or listening to the “news”, here are more than one dozen vectors where we are winning, as stipulated in the December 2011 issue of “The Futurist.”

• Access to clean water (percentage of people with)
• Adult literacy rate
• Enrolled in secondary school (percentage of people)
• GDP per capita
• GDP per unit of energy consumption
• HIV prevalence among fifteen to 49 year olds
• Infant mortality rates
• Internet access and use
• Life expectancy
• People living on USD$1.25 a day (purchasing power parity)
• Physicians and health care workers per 1,000 people
• Quantity of countries that have or plan to have nuclear weapons
• Research and development expenditures (percentage of national budgets)
• Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries
• Undernourishment
• Women in parliamentary governments (percentage of)

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

• How to Manage Content Presentations for Consensual Understanding (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How To Create and Sustain a Participatory Environment (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How to Communicate Meeting and Workshop Results (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• How To Plan Appropriate Group Processes (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• Federal report shows drops in infant mortality, preterm birth rates (nih.gov)

The Ten Commandments of Facilitative Leadership

Following are our Ten Commandments or guiding principles for dealing with people (all based on “Treat others as you wish to be treated”):

• People are creative if asked.
• People are intelligent.
• People are intrinsically reasonable.
• People do not like to be blamed.
• People have different goals in life.
• People prefer the positive to the negative.
• People share similar fears.
• People want to be recognized.
• Never embarrass people, especially in public.
• People want to make a difference.

For detailed support, see your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST Professional Facilitative Leadership training  session offered around the world (see http://www.mgrush.com/ for a current schedule).

Related articles

• Benefits of Facilitative Leadership (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
• The Ten Commandments of Leadership (leaderstips.wordpress.com)

Aspiring to Be Unconsciously Competent

The Four Stages of Consciousness and Competence

As we progress and increase our abilities, we may note an evolution of competency, illustrated in the chart above.  First, note that consciousness precedes competence.  We do not achieve a consistent level of success until we have developed consciousness about what is required.  Secondly, we discover that the amount of time between each of the stages decreases as we make progress.  Let’s look at each of the stages and the aphorisms offered up by John Maxwell that capture the sentiment of each stage.

Unconsciously Incompetent

Before we undertake a complex activity, we slumber through an area of unconscious incompetent.  We may linger in this stage for decades.  Look at the amount of time it takes to discover the difference between well-run and poorly run meetings.  In this stupor, you “do not know what you do not know.” You both lack knowledge and skills, and are unaware of your incapacity.

 Consciously Incompetent

Yet another stage remains before we become competent, and here we develop increased consciousness.  During this stage we also develop aspirations and hopes. We begin to envision ourselves as competent, and contributory.  You may also exist in this state for a long time, depending on your determination to learn and the real extent to which you accept your incompetence.  Most importantly, your consciousness enables you to observe and identify the characteristics of competency, typically in others as you begin to “know what you don’t know.”

Consciously Competent

Cast into the role of facilitator, we find ourselves slipping into and out of competency.  We can make our competency more steady-state by taking formal training, practicing, and participating with others who aspire to be better.  Developing competence will occur much faster than developing consciousness.  The practice and training help, but so does the increase in consciousness. We “grow and know and it starts to show.”

 Unconsciously Competent

With lots of practice and experience, you reach a point where you no longer have to think about what you are doing.  You become competent without the significant effort that characterizes the state of conscious competence.  In fact, we will drift in and out of unconscious competence, based on the skills we master quickly.  It takes little time to become unconsciously competent, only practice. Here we are called upon “because of what we know.”  Eventually we know that it feels right and we do it.

Howell (1982) originally describes the four stages:

“Unconscious incompetence – this is the stage where you are not even aware that you do not have a particular competence. Conscious incompetence – this is when you know that you want to learn how to do something but you are incompetent at doing it. Conscious competence – this is when you can achieve this particular task but you are very conscious about everything you do. Unconscious competence – this is when you finally master it and you do not even think about what you have such as when you have learned to ride a bike very successfully”
– (Howell, 1982, p.29-33)

Remember, consciousness precedes competence, and superb competence does not take much time, but it does take practice.  Hope you are getting your fair share of challenges, and don’t forget about our FAST and FAST+ Advanced classes for the opportunity for more practice and feedback.

See also:

Howell, W.S. (1982). The empathic communicator. University of Minnesota: Wadsworth Publishing Company

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs)