about competence building - it's all about transfer

(new section in the gamma edition of the book)

The ultimate goal of all competence building is to transfer learning activities, experience and shared insights into your permanent ability to perform well. What we want is to hard wire competence in our body, so that we have the potential to perform in a particular domain in our fingers, in our brains and in our hearts. Currently there’s a TV show running named ‘Dollhouse’. The show is not about Barbie and Ken, but about people that are brainwashed and literally programmed with a specific personality and skill set. Those people are called the dolls, and you do not want to be one of them or encounter one of them. They are programmed to kill or seduce or both. In a freaky and scary world, that would be the way to build competence: upload skills and hard wire them into your brain, then erase them when no longer needed. An older movie called The Matrix has a similar scene where the main character Neo uploads the competence to fly a helicopter while blinking his eyes. If only such technology existed, I hear you say…

In real life, competence building takes work and there are two golden rules to better transfer learning and experience:

·         Relevant: the brain doesn’t care for what is not relevant. Transfer is more likely to occur if you can link it with previously stored knowledge or experiences. Transfer is more likely to happen when relevant for your particular context or for what is on your mind at that time. The proverb – probably a Chinese one- says: “You can only learn what you already know”. Actually, you can only learn more of what you already know somewhat.

·         Repeat: Transfer gets stronger with repetition. What you encounter more, is a candidate to get hard wired into your competence. That makes sense. What we need to do most of the time feels like it is automatic and happens without thinking.


Before the intermezzo we’ll cover 7 tips to help you transfer learning, doing and sharing into your competence. After the intermezzo, I present you with 3 tools to help you do so.


Key point : The key word in competence building is transfer. We want to transfer the learning activities and experience into our permanent ability to perform (a.k.a. our competence).