Many people don't learn, because they lack the knowledge that they could or should learn. How do we teach or address those people in software development, that are ignorant about their knowledge or lack of?

We came up with four levels of conciosness about your competence:

1. inconcious incompetence
   • you don't know that you don't know
2. concious incompetence
   • you know, you need to learn
3. concious competence
   • you perform by applying the rules that you learned
4. inconcious competence
   • you perform very well, but can't explain why

The first level is what I call "Second Order Incompetence". Those are the people that are hard to address with new and better stuff. They might even be aware that they perform badly, but they don't know any better and don't know what to ask for. Worst, they might perform badly and are unaware of it, i.e. "it has to be done that way." or "we did it always that way".

To raise someone from level 1 to level 2 only marketing and PR seems to be the only way to address them. Externally induced awareness is required.

From Level 2 to Level 3 requires learning, teaching, exercising and the willingness to do so.

Raising the bar to Level 4 requires a lot of expertise and immersion into the subject.