The Enabler Level - Marcello Avila

I like to see upskilling by stages to make the task less daunting.

Four Stages of Competence

There is a famous framework known as “The Four Stages of Competence” used to describe the psychological stages of learning a specific topic. Those are:

Unconscious Incompetence: This is the first stage where you don’t know what you don’t know. You are not aware of the skill and your lack of proficiency.
Conscious Incompetence: At this stage, you are aware of the skill that you don’t possess and your lack of proficiency in it. You recognize what you don’t know.
Conscious Competence: Here, you know how to use the skill but require concentration and effort to perform it. The skill is not yet second nature or automatic.
Unconscious Competence: At this final stage, you have practiced the skill so much that it has become “second nature,” and you can perform it with ease and without conscious effort.

Enabler Level

We’re all ignorant, always. Except we ignore different things among ourselves. Embracing this is a part of adopting a growth mindset; getting comfortable seeking for help because we are aware that we don’t have the perfect skills to complete a task and there is some room for improvement.

This is helpful because it removes the psychological blame a newbie may experience of not being enough which often blocks and delays people from achieving their goals.

What is it?

I see the Enabler Level like a stage 2.5 of the Competence stages. One of the key points? Know your topic risk boundaries. Understanding the fundamentals plus the topic boundaries, creates comfort in experimentation because you’re not afraid or extra cautious of messing something up. This will accelerate your learning.

Together with a growth mindset and a fail fast approach to problem solving you will reach an adequate solution soon and be able to tailor the solution better for the end goal

Problem solving

This is my depiction for approaching solving a problem:

Understand the problem.
Justify it to measure the impact of the problem.
Define the scope: What’s the current overall behavior of the system and what cannot change.
Research for known solutions.
Apply 1 or 2 solutions and check if they are enough.
If those work, spend some time understanding what they do and document it.
If they don’t work, keep going:
Spend some time understanding why not.
Upskill: You’re likely at the verge of a new problem.
Study the new information and found concepts. You may need to ask for help here.
Start these steps again into this nested problem.

By step 9, I’ve reached the “Conscious Competence” level and can focus on deep diving into that required topic.

Risk Management

When you know your ground and understand the expectations of the system, you can likely re-build it even by mimicking and not understanding all why’s. You know which buttons you can and cannot press, you know where are the manuals or helpful references; you can browse them effectively, you can align a secure environment with your stakeholders to reduce impact. All to achieve confidence.

Examples

Now, this article has been kind of ambiguous. Let me detail a couple of examples of how this works for me:

Example 1: Your Toddler’s Car Broke

Understand the problem: The car won’t turn on.
Justify it: My kid feels joy when playing with it and some money was invested; we can’t just immediately throw it in the trash.
Scope: The wheels need to start rolling again
Known solutions: Check a manual for troubleshooting steps. Replace the batteries. Check the batteries for leakages.
Solution 1: Remove the battery case, add new batteries, try the turn on button.
Did it work? Problem solved! You learned that car will not work w/o battery.
It didn’t work?
So the battery didn’t help. Check for disabler buttons or states. Can you actually tweak some other options?
We have a new problem: The car is internally damaged.
The new problem: The car will not start and I may need to break an unfixable piece of plastic to open and diagnose it; very risky.
Solution: Either discard the car or continue to push it manually to play it.

We can’t simply discard stuff whey they stop working as expected. But we may need to discard stuff in the best interest of our time and money. But let’s be able to justify it by applying a problem solving framework.

Example 2: I Am a People Pleaser

Understand the problem: I’m constantly agreeing to do stuff I don’t really want to do.
Justify it: It’s causing putting off my real passions and needs.
Scope: It’s interfering with my personal project and sleep habits.
Known solutions: Say “no” even though it’s uncomfortable. Isolate from social situations. Reject my sleep habits.
Solution 1: Say no and feel a deep shame.
Did it work? Problem solved! You learned that feeling is uncomfortable but it’s good on the long run.
It didn’t work?
So saying “no” didn’t help. Try to isolate from social gatherings. Do you think you’ll endure the loneliness?
We have a new problem: I don’t have the tools to endure saying “no”.
The new problem: I feel lonely and need more social interaction.
Solution: Either go back to people pleasing or seek professional help

We can’t simply endure toxic behaviors forever. Maybe postpone it? Grow and learn psychologically? Either way, we need to move on and evolve through our problems.

By getting the reference of the competence levels, I discovered the “Johari Window”. Pretty interesting; it’s a psychology technique to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others.