The smartest people I know don’t merely play the game. They play to where the game is going, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor. It is the existential imperative of social constructs to impose structure and compliance on human progress, but the irony is that progress too often involves disrupting and breaking outmoded structures and the construct becomes a hindrance to the very thing it was designed to promote. In short, rulebooks become useless when the rules of the game change. This is often to the extreme disadvantage to the innovator at the beginning of a structural shift, and to the extreme advantage of the innovator by the end.
What We Know About Competence So Far
The popular literature of competence typically settles on four mental models which I will briefly review here:
- Peter Principle: Organizations promote executives to their lowest level of incompetence as a function of imperfect information.
- Dunning-Kruger: Incompetents overestimate their ability due to their lack of knowledge; Competents underestimate theirs due to awareness of the state of knowledge. Describes why the Peter Principle is a cycle rather than an end-state.
- Four stages of Learning: The corollary of the 2x2 knowns vs unknowns matrix. Explains Dunning-Kruger by dimensionalizing perception vs reality. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus have a less well known Five stage version essentially dividing rules-based and first principles-based competence)
Tools (figuratively) of the Trade (literally)
The prevailing modes of thought about competence above has spawned a mass of tools to help people run up the rungs faster. I particularly like competency maps like this:
Every company with an established HR process tries to develop competence ladders to discretize compensation and contribution; every occupation eventually develops competence indicators to set standards and further the interests of the in-crowd. The finance industry, for example, has the CFA certification, which is at once challenging for most candidates while at the same time being completely useless in practical applications.
Describing Meta-Competence
With the caveat that this is still a half-baked idea in my head:
- Meta-competence is about recognizing what competencies are undervalued and what competencies are going to be obsoleted (by machines)/commoditized (by humans)
- Every individual needs meta-competence to truly forge their own path instead of being caught up in the vicissitudes of circumstance.
- Every company needs to harness meta-competence to determine investment spend (from marketing to technology to research to workforce) and also determine business model (to match pricing and customer strategy accordingly). Most often this is lumped under the broad term of “intelligence” and treated as a high-class/luxury problem rather than existential threat.
- The tools for meta-competence will be starkly different than the existing toolset
Priors
Meta-competence is not new: Google serves up an early mention by Reva Brown over 20 years ago, but it does not appear to be focused on the self as it is on the corporation. Metacognition is focused on inward processes whereas I am more concerned the individual and the company’s adaptive ability to broader external shifts.
Some Key Examples of Meta-Competence (a list in progress)
- Keynes foreseeing the economic collapse of Weimar Germany in 1919 (and subsequently establishing the postwar economic system at Bretton Woods)
- Martin Luther King marching from Selma in 1965
- Singapore’s 1970s pivot to English as a first language (and closure of vernacular schools in 1987)
- Andy Grove completely abandoning memory and charging into microprocessors in 1985
- Soviet Union adoption of glastnost and perestroika (the idea survived the entity) in 1986
- George Soros “breaking” the Bank of England in 1992
- Mike Burry/John Paulson shorting mortgage backed securities in 2007
- Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to mobile in 2013
A Counter Example
The ultimate why
Meta-competence is what separates humanity from other living beings. Plants and animals are solely focused on their individual (mostly genetic) imperatives and the emergent processes are not managed, nor are individual actions altered due to changes in changes. Only humanity is able to play out current positions and trajectories to conclusions and take actions on things and world-states that don’t yet exist.
