There is a peculiar problem that appears when someone becomes very good at something.
At first, learning is visible. A beginner has to think about nearly every step. They follow instructions, remember rules, make mistakes, correct themselves and gradually recognise patterns. What was once deliberate becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes fluency. Eventually, a skilled person can perform actions without consciously reconstructing the reasoning that made those actions possible in the first place.
That is generally considered progress. And it is.
But there is a point at which progress creates a new problem: the person who knows how to do something exceptionally well can become surprisingly bad at explaining how to do it.
This is one of the less obvious consequences of experience.
The problem is not that experienced people lack knowledge. Quite the opposite. They possess so much integrated knowledge that parts of it have disappeared from conscious access. Their expertise has become compressed. They no longer experience the individual pieces of knowledge as individual pieces. They experience a situation, recognise what is happening, sense what matters, and act.
That compression is useful for performing the work. It becomes problematic when the same person has to teach someone who has not yet developed the compression.
This is what makes unconscious competence such an important subject for anyone who teaches, trains, coaches, mentors or transfers professional knowledge. The central difficulty is not simply getting knowledge from one person’s head into another person’s head. The deeper difficulty is that expertise changes the way the expert experiences the task itself.
The expert sees a whole.
The learner needs the pieces.
And somewhere between those two perspectives, a great deal of knowledge can disappear.
My view on this has changed over time. I used to think that experienced professionals primarily needed to become better at explaining what they knew. I now think that is only part of the problem. The deeper challenge is that experience alters the internal representation of knowledge. An expert does not merely know more than a beginner. An expert often sees differently. What was once a sequence of decisions has become a single recognisable pattern.
That means effective teaching sometimes requires something counterintuitive: the expert has to temporarily become less efficient.
They have to slow down a process that experience has made almost automatic, recover decisions they no longer consciously notice, and reconstruct the path by which they arrived at competence.
That is difficult. It is also teachable.
What unconscious competence actually changes
The familiar four-stage model of conscious competence is useful as a starting point: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. The model describes a progression from not knowing that you do not know, through recognising the gap and deliberately practising, toward eventually performing the skill without conscious effort.
The final stage is attractive because it represents mastery. Yet the model is frequently interpreted as though unconscious competence simply means “being really good at something.”
That interpretation misses the more interesting consequence.
Unconscious competence is partly a change in the accessibility of knowledge.
Consider someone who has driven a car for twenty years. They do not normally narrate the sequence of checking mirrors, judging distance, adjusting pressure on the pedals, monitoring surrounding traffic and anticipating the behaviour of other road users. They simply drive. Ask them to explain exactly how they know when to brake while approaching a complicated intersection and the answer may become surprisingly vague.
They might say, “You just know.”
That answer is not necessarily evasive. It may be accurate.
The knowledge has become embodied in perception and action rather than remaining available as an explicit verbal sequence.
Something similar happens in professional work.
An experienced project manager may enter a meeting and immediately sense that a decision will not hold. An experienced functional manager may look at a process and recognise that the apparent problem is actually a symptom of something upstream. An experienced consultant may hear a client’s description of a problem and immediately become suspicious of the framing itself.
Ask what triggered that judgement and the expert may struggle.
“Something didn’t feel right.”
“There were a few warning signs.”
“I’ve seen this before.”
These answers are frustrating if you are trying to teach the skill. Yet they contain an important clue. Expertise is frequently built from accumulated pattern recognition. Years of exposure have allowed the mind to associate combinations of circumstances with likely outcomes. The expert does not consciously retrieve every previous example. The pattern has become compressed into a recognition system.
That compression is one of the great advantages of experience.
It is also one of its great teaching problems.
Experience is a compression algorithm
I find it useful to think of experience as a kind of compression process.
A beginner experiences a professional task as a large number of separate pieces. They have to remember concepts, rules, exceptions, sequences, questions, signals and possible responses. The cognitive load is high because very little has yet been organised into meaningful patterns.
Experience gradually reduces that load.
The expert does not necessarily remember more individual facts in the moment. Instead, the expert has developed relationships between facts. A situation that once required ten separate observations may eventually be recognised as one meaningful pattern.
This is why an experienced person can sometimes appear almost effortless.
The effort has not disappeared from history. It has been absorbed by history.
Years of repetition, mistakes, corrections and exposure have effectively built shortcuts. The expert can move directly from perception to interpretation because the intermediate reasoning has become largely automatic.
This also explains why experts can underestimate the difficulty of their own work.
They remember the destination more clearly than the road that took them there.
That creates what I would call the compression gap: the distance between the way an expert internally represents a task and the way a novice needs that task to be represented in order to learn it.
The compression gap is easy to miss because the expert and learner can be looking at exactly the same thing while experiencing completely different problems.
An experienced analyst might look at a messy process diagram and immediately notice three structural weaknesses. A novice sees forty boxes and arrows.
The analyst says, “The problem is obvious.”
For the novice, nothing is obvious.
The difference is not intelligence. It is compression.
The expert has bundled hundreds of previous observations into a smaller number of recognisable patterns. The novice still has to inspect the individual pieces.
This matters because poor teaching frequently starts from the expert’s compressed representation.
The expert teaches the conclusion.
The learner needs access to the reasoning that made the conclusion possible.
The curse is not knowledge. It is invisible knowledge.
The expression “curse of knowledge” is frequently used to describe the difficulty experts have in imagining what beginners do not know. That idea is useful, but I think it can obscure an important mechanism.
The problem is not simply that experts have forgotten what it was like to be beginners.
Sometimes they genuinely cannot reconstruct their former way of thinking.
There is a difference.
Forgetting what it felt like to be inexperienced is a psychological problem. Losing conscious access to the intermediate steps of expertise is a structural consequence of learning.
That distinction matters because the remedy is different.
If the problem were simply empathy, we could tell experts to imagine themselves as beginners.
But imagining yourself as a beginner does not necessarily recover the reasoning that experience has compressed.
An expert can sincerely try to explain something and still skip the most important steps.
This is particularly visible in professional environments. Someone who has performed a task hundreds of times may say, “First, you analyse the situation.” That sounds perfectly reasonable until you ask what analyse means.
What do you look at first?
What do you deliberately ignore?
What signals make you change direction?
What tells you that the apparent problem is not the real problem?
Which information is missing?
When do you stop gathering information?
What would make you reject your initial interpretation?
Those questions begin to unpack the compressed knowledge.
They also reveal something else: competence is rarely just a sequence of actions.
It contains perception, judgement, prioritisation, timing and interpretation.
That is why simply documenting a process does not necessarily transfer expertise.
A process document might tell someone what happens.
It does not necessarily tell them what an experienced person notices while it happens.
And noticing is often where expertise begins.
The hidden steps between seeing and doing
One of the most useful questions for an expert is therefore not “How do you do this?”
It is:
“What do you notice that tells you what to do next?”
That question changes the teaching conversation.
Suppose an experienced trainer explains how to conduct a needs analysis. The obvious answer might be a sequence: talk to stakeholders, identify the problem, define the target group, establish learning objectives and design the intervention.
All of that may be correct.
But an experienced practitioner is doing something else at the same time.
They are interpreting what people say.
They are noticing contradictions between the stated problem and the operational reality.
They are recognising when someone is asking for training because training is easier to request than organisational change.
They are deciding which information deserves further investigation.
They are judging when enough information has been gathered.
Those judgements are rarely written in the formal procedure.
Yet they can determine whether the procedure produces a useful result.
This is why experienced professionals sometimes create training that feels strangely thin despite containing technically correct information. They have documented the visible process while leaving the invisible judgement behind.
The learner receives the map but not the navigation.
This distinction has become increasingly important in my own thinking about knowledge and training. After years of working around information, processes and systems, I have repeatedly seen that the formal description of work is only one layer of how work actually gets done. The documented process says what should happen. The experienced practitioner also carries a large collection of signals about what tends to go wrong, what deserves attention and when the formal process is insufficient.
That knowledge is difficult to document precisely because it was never stored as a document in the first place.
It was accumulated through experience.
Why “just explain your process” fails
This is where a common assumption about teaching needs to be challenged.
We tend to believe that if someone is highly competent, they are naturally well positioned to teach the skill.
That is only partly true.
Expertise gives someone valuable raw material for teaching. It does not automatically give them teaching access to their own expertise.
In fact, the relationship can sometimes run in the opposite direction.
The better someone becomes at performing a task automatically, the more difficult it may become to reconstruct the conscious sequence that a learner needs.
This does not mean experts make poor teachers. Some of the best teachers are deeply experienced practitioners. It means that expertise and teachability are separate capabilities.
The expert needs to perform a second operation: decompression.
If experience compresses knowledge into patterns, teaching requires the expert to decompress those patterns into observable and learnable components.
That does not mean turning everything into a rigid checklist.
Quite the opposite.
A useful teaching sequence needs to preserve the structure of the expert’s judgement while making enough of that judgement visible for another person to practise it.
The question is not simply:
“What are the steps?”
It is:
“What happens between the steps?”
That space is where much of professional competence lives.
Slowing down expertise
The first practical implication is therefore simple, although it is not always easy: experts need a deliberate way to slow themselves down.
Not physically. Cognitively.
When an expert performs a task automatically, asking them to explain it afterwards can produce a poor reconstruction. Memory tends to preserve the broad pattern rather than every micro-decision. A better approach is to interrupt the task itself or reconstruct a specific case in enough detail to expose the decisions.
Take a real example rather than a hypothetical one.
Ask the expert to walk through what happened.
Then stop repeatedly.
What did you notice here?
What made that relevant?
What alternatives did you consider?
Why did you investigate that and not something else?
What would have made you choose differently?
What did you know at this point that the learner does not yet know?
What signal would have told you that your interpretation was wrong?
These questions do something important. They turn intuition into an object of inspection.
The goal is not to eliminate intuition.
That would be a mistake.
Expert intuition is valuable precisely because it allows rapid recognition and action. The goal is to make enough of the intuition inspectable that another person can begin developing the underlying pattern-recognition system.
This is why real cases are so powerful in teaching expertise. A case contains the ambiguity, incomplete information and competing signals that are normally absent from polished instructions.
A learner who is shown only the final answer learns the answer.
A learner who is shown the situation, the available information, the competing interpretations and the decision point begins to learn the judgement.
That is a much deeper form of transfer.
The expert needs to explain the forks, not just the road
There is another pattern worth noticing.
Experts frequently describe the path they took as though it were inevitable.
It rarely was.
Looking backwards, a successful decision can acquire a false sense of necessity. The expert remembers the route that worked and forgets the alternatives that were discarded along the way.
For teaching, those discarded alternatives are extremely valuable.
Imagine an experienced professional reviewing a difficult situation and saying, “I immediately knew we should do X.”
That is precisely where the teacher should become suspicious.
Immediately?
Why X?
What would have made Y more appropriate?
What information would have changed the decision?
What did you rule out?
The learner needs to see the forks in the road.
This leads to a second useful principle: teach the decision points, not just the sequence.
A sequence tells a learner what happened.
A decision point tells a learner how to adapt.
That difference becomes critical when the learner eventually encounters a situation that does not resemble the example from training.
If the training teaches a fixed sequence, deviation creates uncertainty.
If the training teaches how to recognise the conditions under which a decision changes, the learner has something transferable.
This is one reason experienced people sometimes underestimate what needs to be taught. They remember the smooth path through a task because they have travelled it so often. The learner needs to know where the road forks.
Decompression has limits
There is, however, a danger in all of this.
Once we discover that expertise contains hidden steps, it is tempting to try to make everything explicit.
That can create another problem.
Some knowledge is difficult to articulate without destroying the very efficiency that makes it useful. Some judgements depend on subtle combinations of context that cannot be captured adequately in a fixed instruction. Some skills need demonstration, imitation and repeated exposure rather than verbal explanation.
This means decompression should not be confused with exhaustive documentation.
The purpose is not to turn intuition into a thousand-step manual.
The purpose is to identify the parts of the compressed knowledge that a learner needs access to in order to develop their own competence.
That requires judgement from the teacher too.
A useful training design therefore moves between explicit instruction and experience. Explain enough to give the learner a structure. Let them encounter a problem. Observe what they notice. Ask them to explain their reasoning. Correct the interpretation where necessary. Repeat with greater complexity.
The learner gradually builds their own compression.
That last point is essential.
The goal of teaching expertise is not to transfer the expert’s intuition intact. That is impossible. The learner has to build a new internal model through their own experience.
Good teaching therefore does not remove the need for experience. It makes experience more useful.
From knowledge transfer to pattern formation
This changes how we should think about training.
The conventional image of training is a transfer model: someone possesses knowledge, someone else lacks it, and training moves the knowledge from one side to the other.
That model is attractive because it is simple.
It is also incomplete.
If competence depends partly on pattern recognition, judgement and contextual interpretation, then training cannot simply transfer finished knowledge. It has to create conditions in which the learner can form the patterns that the expert already possesses.
That is a different design problem.
The trainer needs to ask:
What must the learner be able to recognise?
Which decisions should they eventually make without assistance?
Which mistakes are useful because they reveal a misunderstanding?
Which examples expose important variation rather than merely confirming the rule?
Which parts of the expert’s reasoning need to be visible?
And which parts should remain deliberately open so the learner develops judgement rather than memorising a script?
These questions lead toward a more useful understanding of training.
Training is not merely the packaging of knowledge.
It is the design of experiences through which another person can gradually construct competence.
That perspective also explains why large quantities of content can be surprisingly ineffective. A learner can consume twenty hours of material and still lack the pattern-recognition required to act independently.
Content describes.
Practice discriminates.
Feedback recalibrates.
Experience compresses.
The cycle has to continue.
Three observations that follow from this
Once we take unconscious competence seriously, several less obvious consequences appear.
The first is that the more experienced the expert, the more carefully we should interrogate the obvious.
If something feels self-evident to an expert, that is not proof that it is simple. It can be evidence that the expert has compressed a large amount of reasoning into a single recognition.
“Obviously” is sometimes a sign that teaching needs to slow down.
The second is that errors are not merely evidence of missing knowledge; they are windows into the learner’s developing mental model.
When a learner makes a mistake, the useful question is not simply, “What did they get wrong?” It is, “What did they believe that made the mistake reasonable?”
That question reveals the structure the learner is currently building.
A correction that only supplies the right answer may fix the immediate error. A correction that exposes the underlying misunderstanding helps reshape the model.
The third is that experts need to learn how to observe their own intuition if they want to teach it.
This is perhaps the most important consequence.
The expert cannot simply possess expertise and expect it to become teachable by being described. They need a method for examining their own decisions.
That might involve recording a real task, reconstructing a difficult case, thinking aloud during practice, comparing several cases, identifying recurring signals, or deliberately analysing decisions that went wrong.
The method matters less than the principle.
The expert must temporarily move from using the pattern to looking at the pattern.
That is a different cognitive activity.
A practical discipline for turning intuition into teaching
I have come to think that there is a useful sequence hidden inside all of this.
Start with a real situation rather than an abstract explanation.
Reconstruct what the expert saw.
Identify the moments where the direction of the work changed.
At each moment, recover the signal that caused the change.
Then identify the alternatives that were available.
Next, make the judgement explicit: what made one option preferable?
Finally, give the learner a similar situation in which the answer is not supplied.
This sequence does something that ordinary explanation struggles to do. It preserves the relationship between context, perception, judgement and action.
It also respects the reality that expertise is not simply a collection of instructions.
A person who knows what to do has procedural knowledge.
A person who knows when to do it has contextual knowledge.
A person who knows why to do it has conceptual understanding.
A person who can recognise that the situation has changed and choose differently has begun to develop judgement.
Those layers should not be collapsed into one generic category called “knowledge.”
They behave differently and therefore need to be taught differently.
The uncomfortable role of the expert
There is a final implication that deserves more attention.
Decompressing expertise requires the expert to admit that some of their competence is difficult to explain.
That can feel uncomfortable.
Professionals are accustomed to being valued for knowing what to do. Saying “I don’t actually know how I know that” can sound like a confession of weakness.
It is not.
It is often evidence of maturity.
The experienced practitioner has reached the point where conscious reasoning has given way to a more efficient system. The next developmental step is not necessarily acquiring more knowledge. It is becoming capable of inspecting the knowledge already embedded in that system.
This creates an interesting cycle.
The beginner needs explicit instruction because everything is new.
The competent practitioner needs deliberate practice because conscious performance is effortful.
The experienced practitioner needs reflection because much of the performance has become automatic.
And the experienced practitioner who wants to teach others needs something further: deliberate decompression.
That last step is easily overlooked because traditional models of competence tend to treat mastery as the endpoint.
For teaching, it is not.
It is the beginning of a different kind of expertise.
What this means for Training Stacks
This is also where my thinking about Training Stacks naturally connects with the broader problem of turning professional knowledge into training.
The interesting question is not simply how to help a subject-matter expert create more content. There is already an abundance of content.
The harder question is how to extract the useful structure from experience without flattening it into generic advice.
A strong training stack therefore needs to capture more than what an expert knows. It needs to expose how the expert recognises situations, makes decisions, handles exceptions and learns from mistakes.
That requires a different starting point from “What should I teach?”
A better starting point is:
“What do I know now that I no longer consciously notice?”
That question opens the door to the hidden part of expertise.
It also changes the role of the expert. Instead of being treated as a container of information from which content must be extracted, the expert becomes an investigator of their own competence.
That is where some of the most valuable training material is likely to be found.
Not in the polished explanation.
In the moment before the explanation.
The hesitation.
The warning signal.
The question that suddenly becomes important.
The option that gets discarded.
The exception that changes the recommendation.
The thing an experienced person notices before everyone else notices that there is a problem.
Those are the fragments from which teachable expertise can be reconstructed.
The unresolved problem
There is still a question I do not think we have solved completely.
How much of expert intuition should actually be made explicit?
There is an obvious temptation to believe that the more we can articulate, the better the teaching will become. I am no longer convinced that this is always true.
Some knowledge probably needs to remain partly implicit until experience gives the learner somewhere to attach it. A novice can be told about ten warning signals and still fail to recognise the situation in which they matter. A practitioner may understand the same signals immediately after encountering the situation several times.
This suggests that there is a boundary to decompression.
The task is not to make all expertise explicit.
The task is to make the right parts explicit at the right stage of learning.
That boundary is difficult to define.
It may also explain why good training feels different from a well-written manual. A manual can contain everything the author knows and still fail to produce competence. Training has to decide what the learner is ready to notice, what they need to practise, and what experience must eventually teach them.
That leaves an interesting tension at the centre of the subject.
Experience compresses knowledge because compression makes action more efficient.
Teaching requires some of that knowledge to be decompressed because learners cannot learn what they cannot see.
But excessive decompression can create another form of overload.
The answer, then, is not to eliminate unconscious competence. Nor is it to force every intuition into a verbal formula.
It is to learn how to move deliberately between compression and decompression.
Conclusion: making the invisible visible
Unconscious competence is usually described as the point at which we can perform a skill without thinking about it. That description is correct, but it understates what has happened.
Experience has changed the structure of the knowledge itself.
Separate facts have become patterns. Individual decisions have become recognition. Repeated problems have become categories. Past mistakes have become warning signals. Deliberate sequences have become fluent responses.
That is why expertise can be both powerful and difficult to teach.
The expert has not merely accumulated knowledge. The expert has compressed it.
When that expert becomes a teacher, the challenge changes. The task is no longer simply to explain what is known. It is to recover enough of the hidden reasoning for another person to begin building their own patterns.
That requires slowing down. It requires looking closely at real decisions, not just successful outcomes. It requires asking what was noticed, what was ignored, what alternatives existed and what caused one path to be chosen over another. It requires treating mistakes as evidence of mental models rather than merely as failures to remember information.
And it requires accepting that some knowledge cannot be transferred directly.
A learner cannot inherit someone else’s intuition.
They have to grow their own.
Perhaps that is the most useful way to think about experience. It does not make knowledge disappear. It changes its shape. What began as something we could explain becomes something we can recognise. What once required conscious effort becomes almost invisible.
The work of teaching expertise is therefore partly an exercise in making the invisible visible again.
Not forever. Not completely.
Just long enough for another person to see what the expert has learned to see.
And then, with enough practice, to stop needing the explanation.
Thanks for reading!
Ruben.
