"In the face of change, the competent are helpless." | Hacker News Reader

"In the face of change, the competent are helpless."

fastcompany.com

60 pointsrobg35 comments

Uhh... I don't think that word means what you think it means.

If you replace 'competent' with 'reliable', the article reads a lot better. But I still pretty much completely disagree with everything he's saying.

Yeah. That's what I kept thinking the entire time I was reading this. Overloading competent with this extra meaning was mildly uncomfortable. Rigid, process oriented, (and only sometimes reliable because of those things) would have been better. Blindly trusting process is like fake competence, a plastic, cartoon version of the real thing.

Real competence is the ability to deal gracefully with exactly the kind of change the article talks about.

I've always used the word "professional." I think it captures it better.

I think he's got half of an idea; people who focus entirely on polish are going to be more resistant to change. Bob Dylan certainly isn't polished. But you can be unpolished and still be a professional. It just means knowing WHEN you're unpolished and trying again.

Bob Dylan isn't predictable, but he still had to learn how to cross-pick and play harmonica like everyone else. It is the appearance of shabby carelessness that creates the effect the author is talking about, not lack of competence.

I get that he does practice, but, at the same time...

He isn't a good singer. That's not to say I don't love his singing. He isn't a dazzling guitarist, or more than a decent harmonica player. What makes him good isn't that he's competent - though I don't doubt that he is. It's his ability to innovate musically and lyrically that makes his music so acclaimed and adored.

I've worked with and been friends with all sorts of artists, writers, programmers. I find that the ones I feel have the most potential aren't the ones who are necessarily the most competent. In fact, a lot of people who AREN'T competent have an edge because if they're there, it's because they're really passionate about what they're doing, not just because they CAN do it. A competent programmer can do what he's told and churn out okay ideas. It's the incompetent ones, though, that want to program because they've got IDEAS. And while they can't be trusted in the same way, they've got a much better chance of turning out something worth keeping.

Not saying the article doesn't do a terrible job of explaining itself, but I think that Seth is TRYING to get at a good idea.

That's the point of the article. He isn't bundling it in with the word. He's bundling it in with the concept.

What he is saying is that 'competence' as defined by those defining it, is tied to process oriented reliability. That that is where competence comes from. You can disagree with that if you want, but it's not overloading the word with extra meaning it's claiming a relationship.

http://aplaplaclizame.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/inigo.jpg

Indeed. This article is an abuse of language writ large. In addition to abusing "competent", it's also abusing "incompetent" to dubious effect. Replace "incompetent" with its synonym "unskilled" and watch the argument implode.

Sadly, Wall Street has traditionally rewarded companies for being competent.

Welllllll.. I guess it's a good thing they hired lots of incompetent senior executives in the last decade, that should bring in plenty of interesting change as they bypass the 'competent' processes and try out new things!

PS: More seriously, I don't buy this one-dimensional definition of competence. I think you can be competent and innovative at the same time - I think I am. I don't think you can reduce risks to near-zero and be innovative at the same time, of course, but I don't think "not failing" is a necessary element of "competence".

"Every situation has a silver lining, and mine was that I got a big insight into what competence is. Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent."

Totally, completely, and incontrovertibly false. People who are competent are those that are effective at solving new problems as they arise.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself, what makes a competent programmer?

Your measure of competence is simply wrong. Reputation != competence, and its a terrible heuristic, especially when dealing with contractors.

"Not so long ago, companies were filled with incompetent workers."

Seth, please come and visit the company I work for. You will find little has changed.

That was one of the worst, most ill informed articles I've read this month (hey, I read a lot). And the only reason I read it at all was because it was on HN, which was unfortunately due to linkbait trickery.

Edit: I just realized it was written by Seth Godin. Now it all makes sense.

How does Seth Godin keep making the front page? I guess this validates him as a marketer. He's not at all impressive (in my eyes) but I suppose he markets what little he has amazingly well. See http://xkcd.com/125/.

It's because he writes short articles that usually make sense on the surface and so people read him because they think it will make them rich.

I really want to like this article. Partly because I'd like to believe I fall into the (appropriately) incompetent bucket.

But it seems to me that I might have a lot of company in there with a large group of people that simply can't get anything done. And so drop projects before they're complete and "zoom" off to the next thing.

Hear, hear. Incompetence may be necessary, but it isn't sufficient.

You have to take into consideration the author is a sales guy and not an operations guy. The problem for a sales guy is, "how do I get my prospective customer to take a risk and shake things up by buying my product?"

An operations guy would read it a lot differently, because it seems to be implying that you have to choose between predictability and innovation.

As any operations guy knows, the reason Toyota etc. are consistent and innovative is because they have gradual continuous improvement throughout the company, led from the bottom-up by the employees themselves.

As you can see, Seth has heard of the term "Six Sigma", but I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means. Not his fault, I wouldn't ask Deming for sales advice either.

At the end of the day what I took from it is the old message: "what made you successful in the past is not guaranteed to make you successful in the future", and a lot of people and companies have trouble letting go and trying something new.

My experience from a decade in manufacturing is that people and copmanies can also be "competent" (using it in the sense of this article) at the process of improvement. That is to say not only do they have reliable, repeatable processes for the tasks they do every day, they also have reliable repeatable processes for improving those things. Using the example from the article, if the contractor was also competent at the improvement process, they would have the ability to experiment in a controlled way with new ways of doing things, and a repeatable process to apply lessons learned from those experiments to ensure that the next time they attempt something they improve on it.

Being competent DOES NOT mean you have to be hidebound.

Yes. Give a man a fish - feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish - he can eat till the river runs dry or gets fished out. But if a man learns how to learn to fish, he can learn to do anything.

They confuse speed with velocity.

We really enjoy your teachings about marketing Seth, just as long as we don't have to repeal Newton's laws to understand them.

The worst part is: the entire article is such an abortion you could do this with what feels like every other line. It's filled with marketing non sense, truisms, conventional "wisdom", wrong definitions and outright lies. It's almost impressive, really.

How is this sentence wrong? Speed and velocity are two different concepts, and Seth's usage is perfectly cromulent.

It's cromulent but I think it needs to be embiggened.

Spoken like a cunning linguist.

Well, speed is a scalar and velocity is a vector. So I think he's saying 'going fast without direction: not so good.'

"Seth Godin is permission-marketing yahoo! at Yahoo!"

Wait, what? Since when does Seth Godin work for Yahoo? Did I just miss a memo?

The article is dated December 19, 2007

Hmm. Seems to me that Toyota is doing pretty well being "competent" by his definition.

Competent people are perpetually looking for change and new ways to express themselves. However, they are looking for meaningful change, not for the kind of pseudo-change that marketing buffoons like Seth Godin thrive on.

Reading that made my frustration with the "New Facebook Complaint-army" grow even more.

A new GUI that I don't know instinctively like the back of my hand? Definitely sucks.

To summarize: Be ready. Shift happens.

This makes a lot of people uneasy.

To summarize:

Shit happens.

When corporations succeed, it's usually in spite of themselves.

BTW, Seth, being a contrarian doesn't automatically make you brilliant.

If I ever met Seth face-to-face, I think I'd grab him by the shoulders and tell him, "Oh, blogga, PLEASE."

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