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Advanced driver training is an interesting activity. Unlike learning to drive in the first place, it does not involve acquiring many new skills. However, most people have to 'unlearn' some ingrained bad habits and replace them with fresh ways of doing things.
In my life outside the IAM, I am a management training consultant – that means I am interested in how people learn. One theory of learning seems to fit the advanced driving scenario very well. It deals with levels of awareness – I call it the Learning Ladder and it goes like this:
Before you learn something, say, basic driving skills, you are at the bottom of the ladder, in a state of Unconscious Incompetence. Think about the time before you learned to drive – you probably had no idea of how the engine and gears worked, how to use the clutch, how to negotiate traffic and other hazards, and so on. You are, to use another term, in a state of blissful ignorance – you don't know how much you don't know.
When you first start to learn to drive, you find out rather quickly how much you don't know. Remember being bewildered by how much there was to cope with? You had to learn to steer the vehicle, to watch for traffic and take your place in it, to look out for road signs and to remember lots of the Highway Code, all the time operating controls that were clumsy and unfamiliar. You have moved up one step of the ladder to the state of Conscious Incompetence – in other words you know what you don't know and you are worried about it. You might well feel at this stage that it's all too difficult and that you will never be able to get it right.
After more lessons and more practice, you start to get it together and it becomes easier – or at least less scary. Your clutch control improves, you stall the engine less often, you become able to do several things at once and, although there are still some rough edges, you begin to feel that you might be able to drive after all. You have now reached the third rung on the ladder – that of Conscious Competence. You know what you have to do, and you can do it as long as you think about it.
Later (for some people much later), after you have passed your Driving Test, you begin to develop a fluency and smoothness in your driving. You realise that you can do it without having to think about it all the time. You are now reaching the top rung of the Learning Ladder, called (as you might have guessed) Unconscious Competence.
So far, so good. Unconscious Competence is great for some activities, like breathing and walking, that go on in the background. It's not always great, though, for activities like driving. At its worst, it can lead to the familiar 'autopilot' syndrome, when you complete a journey – often a familiar one when you are tired or preoccupied, like the drive home from work – without being able to remember anything about it. Unconscious Competence has taken over and allowed you to perform the appropriate actions without being aware of them, so that your mind can deal with other things. But if you had experienced a traffic incident or 'near miss' on that journey, would you have been able to cope with it properly if your mind was detached?
Advanced driver training makes you aware once again about what you are doing. It has the effect of dropping you down one rung of the ladder, back to Conscious Competence, and that can feel a bit uncomfortable. You have to ‘get worse before you get better’, to quote one of the police instructors in the Roadcraft video. But how much better is it to be aware of what you are doing, and what is going on around you, all the time you are driving? That's why we encourage commentary driving, even when you are alone in the car, and why we use terms like concentration, observation, anticipation and hazard awareness. It's also why the Government uses the 'Think!' series of TV and press advertisements.
I believe that this is why advanced driver training is effective. Once your mindset has been changed from Unconscious Competence to Conscious Competence you will find it hard to revert, and will think about your driving nearly all the time. You will find that 'autopilot' driving is a thing of the past! However, it will only succeed if you make a clear effort to remain in the ‘Conscious Competence’ state all the time, by continuing to concentrate, to anticipate and to think about what you are doing. In the previous issue, we discussed the next steps – the possible things you can do to maintain this ideal state, long after you have passed the IAM Advanced Test.