“Competence is the enemy of change“, says Seth Godin in his school transformation manifesto “Stop Stealing Dreams” (free download). He continues by writing “Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat“.
Let’s take a moment to ponder the depth of these words and how this effect really impacts our world. How it slows down the necessary transformation of the world.
Competence is somehow linked to people’s identity as professionals. Fundamental transformations such as the Fourth Revolution threatens many professionals in their own identity. They cannot any more assert the value of their knowledge (painstakingly built through courses and checked through standard evaluations and certificates). In deep societal transformations, there are no standard evaluations and certificates. There is no reference. Competency cannot measured any more. Actual competency might be adaptability and agility, and not fixed knowledge. And so those that define their worth through ‘competence’ resist any change. They feel on the edge of a chasm of unknown, without any fixed marker.
How can we overcome this major hurdle to any disruptive change? Probably by putting less emphasis as a society on formal competence and knowledge. That will be hard, as it has been ingrained by decades of Industrial Age where your worth was measured by your certificates and past positions.
How much do you feel that formal competence defines yourself? How much are you ready to let it go as an identity and instead, identify yourself as an experimenter of life, a human being?
