Are you Incompetent, Unconscious or both?

When learning a new skill, as individuals, we move through four, broad stages of learning and competence, from novice to expert.

It goes something like this:

STAGE 1: You don’t know what you don’t know. You are not aware that you’re incompetent. You’ve never come across the ‘thing’.

STAGE 2: You’re aware that you’re incompetent, but you’re still incompetent. You’ve heard of the ‘thing’ but you don’t know anything about it (and you decide to address that gap).

STAGE 3: With your newly discovered awareness, and a desire to learn, you’ve now developed a level of competence in the ‘thing’. But…you still need to focus in order to succeed, it takes effort.

STAGE 4: This is mastery. You can do the ‘thing’ without thinking about it. It requires little to no effort on your part to achieve success.

This model is a useful framework for determining where you are on your learning journey for a particular skill.

The thinking goes...once you know where you are, then you can take the appropriate next steps to get to the next level (and don't try to skip a level!)

While this is useful for the individual, it turns out we can also follow this same approach for a collective initiative at an organisation.

Whether it’s at the project, program or enterprise level, the diagnostic steps are the same (but the treatment may vary).

Testing/QA Uplift

Eg. If you’re tasked with uplifting software quality at an organisation, the first step in determining their testing maturity should be thinking about where the company currently sits within this framework.

As always, the quality of the questions you ask will determine the quality and usefulness of your responses.

I won’t give you the questions to ask here (maybe I’ll write about that next time) but let’s have a look at a few indicators that would point to their position on this framework.

Quality indicators

Companies at ‘STAGE 1- Unconscious Incompetence’.

Indicators may be:

• No understanding or awareness of proper software testing & release practices.
• Stakeholders struggling to get information on project progress.
• Everything is ‘urgent’, no clear direction on priorities.
• No dedicated testing or QA resources on the team.
• Consistently firefighting issues in production.
• Teams are reactive rather than proactive.
• Project launches delayed.
• Resistant to change.

Companies at ‘STAGE 2 - Conscious Incompetence’.

Indicators may be:

• A few members of the team have QA/Testing knowledge but struggle to populate this across the wider organisation.
• Actively seeking knowledge on Testing/QA best practices, tools, methodologies etc. but not sure where to go.
• Some quality metrics being applied, but this is inconsistent in its application or communication.
• Some awareness of proper testing practices and methods but unclear how to apply them.
• Any improvements to QA/Testing practices are limited to individual projects or initiatives.
• Sporadic application of testing techniques.

Companies at ‘STAGE 3 - Conscious Competence’.

Indicators may be:

• Testing exists as a horizontal collective across the organisation as well as vertically on each project/initiative.
• Defined non-prod environments made available for testing. Path to production is clear and adhered to.
• Reporting and metrics on quality are captured, communicated and understood consistently.
• Investment in training individuals towards a common goal around quality of delivery/end product.
• Clear feedback loops from the customer/user back to the delivery teams.
• Clear, company-wide understanding of the value of structured testing.
• Established QA processes - documented and followed consistently.
• Stakeholder engagement and trust in quality practices is high.
• Testing representation across all delivery teams.
• Test Data strategies in place.

I feel like I could go on and on here for Stage 3, there a lot more indicators of a company striving to improve its quality and having some wins along the way.

Most larger companies are at this stage, the problem is that they view Stage 3 as the end goal and therefore never get to stage 4.

So how do we get to Stage 4?

Well I'm glad you asked...

Company at ‘Stage 4 – Unconscious Competence’.

Indicators are:

• All of the Stage 3 indicators are present (and more).
• Key champions of quality at the organisation move on, time goes by… but the ‘ways of working’ prevail.

That’s it. It's that simple.

(Disclaimer: It's hard.)

It’s no good having all of these practices, processes and procedures in place if they are not sticky.

If you, or someone else, is constantly having to chase, and remind people of what is required then unfortunately you haven't ‘implemented’ a quality practice, you’ve just suggested it.

Achieving stage 4 (in this example) requires quality to be ingrained into the culture.  Yes I know, this is a phrase that’s bandied around too frequently, but for good reason…because it’s true.

If you have quality processes and practices in place but your people are constantly trying to circumvent them, then you need to have a look at the path they are taking and why they are taking it.

Often it’s not because the process is difficult or cumbersome, it’s just that they don’t understand the ‘why’ behind it. If they do understand the ‘why’ and still avoid the processes, then by all means take another look at your processes (or people for that matter) and see if they need 'adjustments'!

Whatever your industry, ultimately it is the end users of your product that bring in your revenue, so it follows that improvements in product quality lead to an increase of loyal customers and a greater revenue and market share for your organisation. Should be a no-brainer right?

Things to do

Talk about quality in your Town Halls, share your customers feedback with the wider team (good and bad) and do whatever you can to keep the customer journey at the centre of whatever you are building.

Include messaging around quality in your company vision and communicate that vision to your team consistently - the vision is what people follow when the instructions are unclear or forgotten.

Support the continuous improvement of processes, and make sure everyone understands why we do things the way we do at this organisation.

In what seems like a contradiction in terms, when it comes to following process we don't want people that blindly follow the rules, we need people that question the 'why', whilst improving how we do things along the way.

If your QA processes require constant resuscitation to survive then it may be time to improve it’s overall fitness, and the way to do that is through the constant assessment of where you are, against where you need to be, adjusting as you go.

Sometimes your team is too close to the issues to see what needs to be done, in that case you may need outside help to assess.

After all, it’s hard to see the picture when you’re inside the frame.