Competence is the enemy of brilliance

I’m going to start writing again. After a rather long hiatus.

You might call these weeknotes. I’m not going to. The likelihood of me doing this every week is slim.

I haven’t written anything for myself in years, so this is really just an attempt to restart a habit. If I write anything after this one, I’ll count it as a small victory.

To understand why I stopped, I need to rewind a little.

Why I stopped

I used to love writing — about design, obviously, but also human interactions, running, my family, and mental health in a very personal way, without the medical labels.

When I was a lot younger, I wrote stories. At one point, even screenplays. I don’t know if I was ever any good, but I loved the creativity of it all. It was an outlet, somewhere for ideas to pollinate. It was always something I did for me. If other people read it and got something out of it, that was a bonus.

A lot of it was slop. I was generating slop years before we had AI to do it for us.

But some of it rang true with others. That was the point: get an idea out there and see if it bounces off the wall. I’ve always been a bit of an open book like that. Transparent, emotive, genuine. What you see is what you get.

Then, a few years ago, I stopped.

It started to feel like there was a lot of scrutiny over what I was writing. I felt it through a couple of lenses.

The first was my own. I got to a point where I questioned whether I was actually saying anything worthwhile, or whether it was only ever for me.

The second was other people editing my writing. At times it changed so much that I couldn’t see the narrative I’d started with. In lots of cases, that’s fine. If it’s a collaborative piece, that’s cool. But these were pieces written from an individual perspective, and by the time several other perspectives had been added, they weren’t mine. I’d got a bit lost along the way, too. I was busy with other things, and I didn’t have the time, energy or inclination to push back.

So some of those pieces went out. My name is on them. I don’t think they’re mine.

At the same time, I was writing while wearing a few different hats, for a few different reasons. The narrative I was trying to thread rarely survived intact — trimmed to fit, cut to a word count, whatever it was.

Somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with writing.

For a long time now, my boss has been encouraging me to get back into it. Just put things out there. Don’t worry about writing in the voice of your employer. Do it for yourself.

It’s very sound advice. I know it is, because it’s exactly what I say to people in my team all the time. But that’s the thing about advice you give to others. You rarely take it yourself.

So, here you are, boss. I’m doing it.

What this has to do with competence

So, this piece is about competence being the enemy of brilliance. There is a thread here with the writing — I haven’t gone on about it for no reason.

I’ve become hyper-aware of this, much more so recently. I look after a team of 20-plus people, and over time I’ve noticed how people’s behaviours change, and what causes it. That’s made me much more aware of my own.

What do I mean by competence and brilliance?

By competence, I mean being dependably good at something. By brilliance, I mean what happens when you’re all in. The risky stuff. The ideas that give you a buzz.

I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet, but I’m pretty good at my job. I’m also a bit of an all-or-nothing person. When I’m all in, you’ll see it. I show up, I obsess, and that thing happens really, really well. When I’m not, it still happens, sometimes, but not to the same level. That’s the difference.

And I think competence gets in the way of brilliance in two ways. It attracts more work. And it makes you comfortable.

What happens when you’re good at something? Usually, people notice. They ask you to do it again. They see you as a competent person to have on a team, so they trust you. They trust that competence.

Then they ask you to do more. So you do, and you do it well. Competently. They see that and think: this person’s doing great, I can give them more responsibility. So they do.

And you take it on, because you’re a competent person. Of course you do.

After a while, you realise you’re doing so much, to a competent level, that you’re not actually doing anything brilliant any more.

How familiar is this?

It’s exactly what happened to my writing.

I’m using writing as a way to get some of that brilliance back. It’s always been my creative channel. But it’s worth saying out loud that there’s a reason the brilliance hasn’t been happening. It’s been diminished by all the competence.

My writing didn’t stop because I ran out of ideas. It became competent. It fitted the format, hit the word count and spoke in the right voice. It just wasn’t mine. And I was too busy being dependable everywhere else to push back.

The questions we stop asking

The second thing competence does is quieter.

When you’re new to something — when you don’t know enough about it — you ask questions. Lots of them. Often the ones everyone else stopped asking a long time ago. Why do we do it this way? Does it need to be like this? Who is this actually for?

That’s where a lot of brilliance comes from. Not knowing.

Competence stops you asking. You already know how it’s done. You get comfortable. Maybe a little complacent. And once you’ve a reputation for getting things right, asking the obvious question, or trying something that might not work, starts to feel like a risk.

When I wrote for myself, I didn’t know if I was any good — and plenty of it wasn’t. But I put the ideas out there anyway, to see what came back. Competent writing can’t afford to be slop. Brilliant writing has to risk it.

A note for leaders and managers

I see this in people in my team, too. And I don’t want anyone to become just a hyper-safe pair of hands.

As leaders, I think we need to be really cognisant of this. It’s all too easy to see someone as a competent person. Someone you can trust and depend on. Those are good qualities. Don’t get me wrong: nothing I’m saying here is against being trustworthy or dependable. Be those things. Just find the balance.

And we need to be careful not to lean on that competence by giving people more, and more, and more. They may well ask what else they can do. And they’ll cope. They’ll compensate — overcompensate, even — with their competence.

What you will notice is that something’s missing. Those high-risk sparks of brilliance — one of the main reasons you hired them in the first place — aren’t there any more.

And you wonder why. Maybe this person has changed. Maybe this isn’t the right role for them. Maybe they’re looking for something new.

Often, none of those things are true. All that’s true is they’re doing too much.

From the outside, they might look like they’re doing it all well enough. But ask them to be truthful about how well they think they’re doing, and I suspect you’d hear that a lot of it is done quite badly — just at a level that still looks competent. What they’ve stopped doing is taking risks. Sticking their head above the parapet.

That’s why I’m having much more open conversations with people in my team about how much they’re taking on, and whether it’s too much. And I think it’s worth asking them, honestly, how well they think they’re doing it all. The aim is that the things they do focus on, they can do brilliantly — and feel that for themselves.

I’m very aware of my own part in this. It’s my job to protect the people in my team from becoming that safe pair of hands. To encourage them. To make sure they’re still doing the work that made them brilliant in the first place. I won’t always get the balance right, but I’m trying.

This is what I’d love leaders, senior or otherwise, to be hyper-aware of.

How can you create more time for the people in your team, and in your business, so that brilliance has room to shine?

If you’re the competent one

It creeps up on you. Before you know it, you’re looking at your own work and thinking: I’m doing all these things, but I don’t feel great about any of them. There’s no buzz of excitement. No “yes, we did that”. Just “we got through that”. “We got that done”.

Then you start to doubt yourself.

So, be aware of it. I’m much more aware of it in myself now. Notice when you’re being handed more because you’re dependable — and when you’re saying yes because it’s the comfortable thing to do.

That’s why I’m writing again. This might be slop. But it’s mine.

Brilliance is a shining light inside of you.

Don’t let competence — or anyone else — diminish it.