7 Steps to Strategize Your Knowledge into Mastery

Some years back, I got into an interesting discussion with an older man. He commented that anyone could be intelligent, but few possess wisdom. That was quite a point. From that point onwards, I have been looking at the journey of self-exploration and how we view ourselves on the spectrum of learning. As you engage in continuous learning, you keep evolving your understanding and skill levels, and you leap the new levels. The question becomes, where do you stop where you are on this spectrum?

KNOWLEDGE: Develop strategic knowledge

Get a competitive edge over others by expanding your strategic knowledge

In simple words, “knowledge means what you know.”

When I was young, I was pretty curious about driving cars. I gathered quite a bit of information about different models, their features, and how different mechanical systems operate together to drive a car. Several times I imagined how fuel is getting ignited and how it is generating thrust, and then I started relating those things with the process of pressing the pedal.

What I was doing at that time was gathering knowledge.

When you learn ‘something’ new, whether it is a new fact or a new skill, focus on acquiring comprehensive knowledge about that ‘something.’ Comprehensive knowledge comprises three types of knowledge – factual, conceptual, procedural, and strategic. These different knowledge types are acquired through the processes like understanding, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. When you learn a new thing, you start knowing some facts about it (factual knowledge). As you unravel new relationships in how things are organized (conceptual knowledge). Then you get to understand how to apply knowledge or do certain things (procedure knowledge). Real learning is how to use different strategies to make the most of your knowledge (strategic knowledge).

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Highly successful leaders have highly developed situational and strategic knowledge. Strategic knowledge is also called knowing about knowledge, which is very important for you to develop. This enables you to monitor your learning and use different strategies to use knowledge and approach different situations using different strategies.

SKILLS: Perfect your skills

What you can do is far more valuable than what you know

In simpler words, “skill is what you know you can do.”

Skill generally refers to something you can do which is verifiable or demonstrable. As years went by, I got my first opportunity to drive a car. The moment I took the wheel and pressed the pedal, I could relate to what it was like pressing the pedal to accelerate the vehicle. I was able to connect my conceptual and factual knowledge with procedural knowledge during this practical experience. However, I needed some practice on having a feel for how much pressure on the pedal means, how much speed, and then how other controls need to be coordinated timely.

The skills are most commonly always considered to be something physical or motor-related. That’s not entirely true. Even ‘evaluating’ and ‘thinking’ is a skill since it requires practice. While I was driving, I was also evaluating the speed and deciding when to press the brake. This triggered my higher-order thinking even though I was learning the skill.

Skill acquisition comes with several different approaches to skills. From a user perspective, it is commonly believed that skills can be acquired by either or combination of various modes like observing vs. doing vs. feeling vs. thinking.

How do you perfect the skill? Well, that comes with practice. Researchers emphasize deliberate practice to excel in a skill. Doing it, again and again, builds confidence. However, note that confidence does NOT mean competence. So even if you have mastered a skill, don’t overrate your confidence as competence yet.

ABILITIES: Integrate your skills with your knowledge

Differentiate yourself from the crowd with differentiating abilities

Let me give you an equation.

KNOWLEDGE + SKILLS = ABILITIES

In more straightforward words, abilities mean: You “can” do it. You have been equipped to do it, but we are yet to see the disposition of how effectively you do it.”

This might contradict the way you have learned to use this term for a while. You might be using this interchangeably to mean several other things. As I started driving and exerted my knowledge at appropriate points, I started making decisions based on speed, distance, traffic, road conditions, and other factors. Demonstrating the driving skill required me to apply some knowledge and concepts like friction and distance before I could stop the car. As I became better at this, someone commented, ‘now you are “able” to drive.’

Yes. That’s what ability means. In reality, ability refers to the total sum of Knowledge and Skill.

“You are not yet there.” Don’t you hear that very often from your colleagues and managers when you just recently attended a training course and have not quite yet put the learning into action yet?

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In order to be known for your abilities, you need to make sure you integrate knowledge and skills very well. While you are learning a new skill, you will need to be cautious about how well-rounded and comprehensive knowledge you are acquiring about this skill. Remember to focus on strategic knowledge if you need to stay out of a crowd of people with the same skills. That’s why “abilities” differentiate people even though they may have ‘supposedly’ acquired similar kinds of knowledge and skill from a training course.

COMPETENCE: Develop a winning attitude

Win others’ confidence by demonstrating competence

As I was ‘able’ to drive a car, I still needed to make several decisions like whether or not to overtake, whether or not to cross speed limits, whether or not to slow down to pedestrians, whether or not to run the car at a steady speed to maintain its systems, among several others, even in a controlled environment or simpler situations like mock-up circuit and relatively less busy roads. As I became good, I developed specific methods or techniques of my own. I tested my newly found methods in certain situations. That gave me confidence that I could probably handle unforeseen situations as well.

What I had developed was an ‘attitude.’ Remember, attitude may mean several things, including approach and behavior, and so forth. Attitude in the professional world means disposition which is represented by attributes like attitude, behavior, approach, methods, techniques, and sometimes mindset.

If you are a manager, you may have a great employee with great abilities, but you are always unhappy with how he does things.

Suppose you have two employees equal in knowledge and skills (I call this ability). In crucial times, with the crucial customer, when things are at stake, who would you send right away without hesitation? The ONE WITH AN OUTSTANDING ATTITUDE.

If you are hiring someone, you probably will employ him for his attitude with the confidence that you can train him for skills. That’s how important attitude is.

Attitude is an important component that defines how you do something and how you do it differently.

Now let me give you another equation. This is something you will encounter more often in your workplace.

ABILITIES + ATTITUDE = COMPETENCE

In simpler terms, competence means: you “can” do it. You have the “right disposition” to do it!! Given the right opportunity, you should be able to do it. However, you have not proved it yet in a real-life situation.

Dreyfus (1986) defines competence as a stage in the journey to mastery. The competence stage is characterized by the following: With experience, the learner begins to recognize more and more context-free and situational elements. At this point, the learner is able to organize the situation and then concentrate on important elements. He is able to assess the situation, set the goal, and then choose the best course of action. He may or may not apply rules. He may or may not be successful, but that constitutes an important element of future expertise.

Ever heard your manager telling you: “I feel (I don’t know yet) that you can do it. You have demonstrated it in similar situations (maybe not the same). You have the competence to do it.” The point here is that acquiring competence in something may mean that you might be ready to go into a real-life situation.

The key clue here is “I feel” instead of “I know” which means referring to competence.

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By mastering your skills, you gain confidence as you do something several times. By integrating knowledge and skills, you differentiate yourself. By displaying a winning attitude, you differentiate yourself. Thus, attitude plays a very important role in how your abilities get noticed as competence and make others believe in your abilities. With the correct mixture of the right abilities with the right attitude, you demonstrate your competence. That’s how others build confidence in you that you “CAN DO”!

PERFORMANCE: Master your environment

Show real-world success by converting your competence into performance

Ever heard this “You got the potential, and I know you got the competence, but I am not sure what is holding you back from giving a great performance.”

This means your competence is not yet proven and visible to the real world. There is a crucial component that makes your competence visible to the world. This is called ENVIRONMENT. It could mean several things, including a real job environment, closer-to-life issues or problems, real-life scenarios, changing conditions, and situations you encounter around you within which you are required to work.

There are many internal and external environmental factors and variables that may affect your competence. External factors could be pressure, competition, job stress, relationships, etc. For example, a great boss who trusts your abilities may become a motivator for you. Internal factors could be negative or positive. Sometimes jealousy with your peers, a negative internal factor also plays an important role in developing competence.

Not everyone gets an ideal environment. But several other professionals do work in the same environment as you. Why do you feel he is being noticed more than you?

The reason is that abilities, attitude, and competence alone or in tandem do not give you a competitive edge when surrounded by similarly abled professionals. You won’t get a competitive edge until you conquer your environment. The one who masters the environment gets noticed. Mastering the environment requires you to assess how well and where exactly it aligns with your best competence.

That’s your sweet spot for you to excel faster.

While bringing the car on the actual roads, I developed an approach to keep one reference mark on the windscreen to follow the lane or curb. This helped me keep the turning of the wheel precisely in accordance with the degree of curvature. What I developed was an attitude, and with that attitude, I got into the competence zone. As I started using this newly learned competence in real-life situations (real roads), I was actually able to “show” my ability to drive on the freeway and swiftly pass the cars to change lanes. I was performing.

Let me give you an equation here.

COMPETENCE + ENVIRONMENT = PERFORMANCE

In simpler words, performance means: You are “actually” able to do it. You have “proved” (demonstrated) it as closer to real-life or actual real-life situations.

Have you noticed that even if you scored an ‘outstanding rating’ in your review last year, this year you were able to manage just ‘good’ ratings?

Why?

The reason is that competence when interacting with the environment comes out in the visible form as PERFORMANCE, which signifies what you are actually able to do.

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The fundamental law of personal performance is that your entire competence may or may not transform into performance. The environment acts as a vital transfer function that controls how much of your competence actually gets converted into performance. That’s why you need to be very cognizant of the environment you are working in.

PROFICIENCY: Strive to attain reproducibility and consistently across situations

Get producible results by acquiring proficiency in your work

Now while I was ‘performing’ as a driver, no one had any issues. They knew I could drive on any road. Even though we may be on untraveled roads, my fellow passenger had a high level of confidence that I would pull it through. Now I was able to switch vehicles, and no matter it was a truck or a small electric car, my skills were equally good. It also did not matter whether I was driving on the busy roads of India or the limitless Autobahn in Germany. This stage of reproducing your performance everywhere and in every situation is called proficiency.

Let me give you one more equation.

PERFORMANCE + REPRODUCIBILITY = PROFICIENCY

In simple words, you have reproduced performance multiple times consistently in numerous real-life situations. Reproducibility comes with consistency.

The business dictionary defines proficiency as “Mastery of a specific behavior or skill demonstrated by consistently superior performance, measured against established or popular standards.” Gerathewohl (1978) made the distinction between performance and proficiency. Performance referred to the execution of action of a more or less specific function, such as pulling a lever or throwing a switch, proficiency, in contrast, was related to the integration of multiple actions.

The concept of proficiency has a component of reproducibility, which means producing the same or similar results in different situations and environments. According to Dreyfus & Dreyfus’s (1986, 2008) model, at the ‘proficient’ level individual exhibits a consistently superior performance characterized by reliability, repeatability, reproducibility, and consistency of his skills regardless of the situation, problem, and challenge.

As per Dreyfus (1986), a proficient individual is deeply involved in the task. He is capable of identifying the important part of the tasks and paying requisite attention. A proficient person sees situations holistically in terms of various elements. As the situation changes, his deliberation, plan, and assessment may change. With changing situations, he is able to see new patterns which deviate from the normal. Decision-making is very quick and fluid because of the experience in similar situations in the past. A proficient performer has experience making situational discriminations that enable recognizing problems and the best approaches for solving the problems. Consistency and reproducibility in performance distinguish this proficiency phase from the previous stages.

Attaining proficiency in critical skills is becoming a key focus of organizations. Organizations expect this state as the desired minimum state of performance of their employees. Quite a bit of research is being conducted in this area, and sooner or later, organizations will demand their employees to demonstrate proficiency rather than performance.

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Just performance is not enough. You will not just be expected but will be ‘required’ to reproduce it consistently to the same standards in a range of real-life situations. You are expected to perform consistently and demonstrate proficiency with a high degree of reproducibility in different environments. It means you have mastered the ‘environment’ (including the unknown ones as well) to the level that the environment does not create any up-and-down variation in your performance.

EXPERTISE: Expose yourself to a series of tough challenges within a niche

Be an authority by specializing in one specific expertise

The question becomes if you are a proficient performer, what does it take to become an expert? The range of researchers has outlined various attributes possessed by experts: Superb mental knowledge representations, ability to handle complexity very well, ability to efficiently store and recall information, ability to process a large amount of information efficiently with minimum cognitive load, also ability to deal with low quality and quantity of data or ambiguous information, ability to selectively filter relevant information, deep problem-solving skills and ability to recognize patterns and better strategies and meta-skills, to name a few.

Dreyfus (1986) explained that experts don’t apply rules, or use any maxims or guidelines. He rather has an intuitive grasp of situations based on his deep tacit understanding. This is the key aspect of this level is that the individual relies on intuition and the analytical approach is used only in new situations or unrecognized problems not earlier experienced. Experts are deemed to have the intuitive capability which is termed as the ability to integrate information from a large array of accumulated experiences to assess the situation; select a course of action through recognition; and then assess the course of action through mental stimulation (Klien, 1999).

Going back to my example of driving the car, I wish I could say I have gained expertise in driving. But the reality is that expertise does not come so quickly. For some of you, proficiency or expertise may mean the same thing. But it is not.

At the expertise level, experience-based deep understanding provides a person at an expert level with a very fluid performance. At this stage, skills become automatic that even an expert is not aware of it. Based on prior experience, they can even develop solutions for new, never-experienced-before situations. Experts adopt a contextual approach to problem-solving and understand the relative, non-absolute nature of knowledge, and this ability distinguishes the “expert” from the “proficient” practitioner. Reflection comes naturally, and experts solve problems almost unconsciously.

Let me give you an equation here:

PROFICIENCY + DELIBERATE PRACTICE = EXPERTISE

Deliberate practice is not just routine practice or any other domain-related activity like work or on-the-job training events. There are four components: focused goals, which a teacher determines in order to improve a specific aspect of performance; concentration and effort; feedback from a teacher comparing actual to desired performance; and further practice opportunities. Feedback from a mentor is a significant factor in learning and skill acquisition.

Eriksson, the father of the concept of deliberate practice, found in his research that the journey to attain expertise in something takes 10000 hours or 10 years of deliberate practice (20 hours for 50 weeks a year for ten years = 10,000). He was referring to world-class expertise.

As a business professional or a job-holding professional, your target probably is not to achieve world-class expertise on the task at hand right away. However, in a complex professional world with ever-growing with cut-throat competition, being just a proficient practitioner is not going to keep you in the race for long. It would be best if you gained professional expertise. Professional expertise is a state of performance where you demonstrate an ability to do a task far more superbly than your peers. This is the stage of task specialization. Just doing the job may not help you achieve this expertise; you need to set some time aside to sharpen your ax deliberately. To attain professional expertise, you need to continuously invest your energy in your area of focus with disciplined 2-3 hours a day in addition to your job or primary professional.

The irony is that the professional world and the jobs keep making you more of a generalist rather than a specialist. From that angle, deliberate practice is not enough in itself or is not practical enough. Sternberg states (1999) explained that deliberate practice requires the interaction of five elements: metacognitive skills, learning skills, thinking skills, knowledge, and motivation. At the center, driving the elements is motivation. Motivation is believed to drive metacognitive skills which in turn activate learning and thinking skills, which then provide feedback to the metacognitive skills, enabling one’s level of expertise to increase. Sustaining deliberate practice and working incessantly toward specialization in one task or skill becomes difficult without any constant motivation. How do you attain unwavering motivation? Well. That happens only when your area of focus is aligned very well with your passions.

In my research, I found that the concept of deliberate practice is rather difficult to maintain in our chaotic, dynamic world where tasks, skills, and situations change drastically and quickly. Amidst those challenges, the key thing to focusing on developing expertise is to get exposed to a range of difficult and challenging situations, cases, and problems. When you get exposed to a series of complex issues, over and over again in varied kinds of settings, you develop a higher level mental model and sense of intuition that allows you to solve even the most unknown or never-seen-before issues quickly. This acts as an intervening factor similar to what reproducibility does at the proficiency level. That’s the hallmark of an expert that he does not have to have seen the exact or similar problems before to solve them. However, this exposure has to be in a narrow field or niche. Expertise is gained and developed within a niche. Thus, my version of the equation is: PROFICIENCY + NICHE EXPOSURE = EXPERTISE

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Focus on deeper and wider exposure to a series of tough problems, failure cycles, and difficult cases within a niche.

Questions

Knowledge to abilities: Are you differentiating yourself from the crowd?
Abilities to competence: Are you winning others’ confidence in you?
Competence to performance: Is your full competence transforming into performance?
Performance to proficiency: Can you deliver reproducible consistent results in every situation?
Proficiency to expertise: Are you an authority on one thing?

Getting through the first 6 stages of progress

1. KNOWLEDGE: Develop strategic knowledge

2. ABILITIES: Integrate your skills with your knowledge

3. COMPETENCE: Develop a winning attitude

4. PERFORMANCE: Master your environment

5. PROFICIENCY: Strive to attain reproducibility and consistently across situations

6. EXPERTISE: Expose yourself to a series of tough challenges within a niche

I will be writing about the progression from expertise to mastery in a separate post, as it requires detailed treatment.

7 Steps to Mastery: Strategizing Your Knowledge Into Mastery Through 6 Equations