Before You Sign That ERP Contract, Ask Where Your Vendor Sits on This Ladder
Every person and every team your ERP program depends on sits somewhere on a four-rung ladder. Most executives never ask where. They find out at go-live, when it’s too expensive to do anything about it.
The ladder looks like this:
Unconscious competence. They do the work well and don’t have to think about it. They’ve seen this exact problem before — many times — and they move through it without drama. You’ll recognise them by how boring their updates are. Nothing is on fire because nothing was ever allowed to catch.
Conscious competence. They can do the work well, but it takes effort and attention. They’re capable — but only within a defined scope, with a clear start, a clear end, and a clear point of report. Give them a contained task and they’ll deliver. Give them an open-ended one and you’ll find the edges of what they actually know.
Conscious incompetence. They know they don’t know. This is actually the safest place to be wrong, because at least the gap is visible. The danger isn’t this person — it’s mistaking confidence for competence and never noticing they’re here.
Unconscious incompetence. They don’t know what they don’t know — and they’ll tell you, with total conviction, that everything is fine. This is the rung that sinks ERP programs. Not because anyone lied. Because nobody knew enough to know they were wrong.
Where This Shows Up in Your Program
A council brings in an implementation partner who’s done “ERP rollouts” before — but never this module, never this industry, never integrated with this many legacy systems. They are confident. They are also, on this specific work, in conscious incompetence at best. The status reports stay green because the team genuinely believes they’re on track. Nobody’s hiding anything. They just don’t have the pattern-recognition yet to see the risk in front of them.
Compare that to a project director who’s run six go-lives in local government, who can tell you in the first steering committee meeting exactly which three things will break in month four — because they’ve watched them break before, on someone else’s project. That’s unconscious competence. You will not find this person impressive in the way a sales pitch is impressive. You’ll find them quiet. Quiet is the tell.
The mistake most executives make is treating confidence as the signal. It isn’t. Confidence is available to all four rungs. Only one of them has earned it.
What This Means Before You Start
If you’re about to begin an ERP journey, the model gives you three things to do — not after go-live, now:
Assess yourself first. Before you assess anyone else, ask where you sit. If this is your first major system implementation, you are, by definition, somewhere in conscious incompetence — and that’s fine, as long as you know it. The executives who get hurt are the ones who assume their general business judgement transfers directly to ERP judgement. It doesn’t, fully. Knowing where you sit is what lets you ask better questions instead of nodding through someone else’s confidence.
Assess the people you’re engaging — honestly, not by reputation. A vendor’s logo and a vendor’s competence on yourspecific program are two different facts. Ask for the pattern-recognition test directly: “Tell me the three things most likely to go wrong on a project like this, and how you’d know early.” Someone with unconscious competence will answer in seconds, specifically. Someone without it will answer in generalities, or with reassurance.
Agree what value looks like before the work starts — not during. This is the part most programs skip. If you don’t define upfront what “delivering value” means — what the system is actually meant to achieve, for whom, by when — you have no way to hold anyone accountable to it later. You’ll have status reports instead. Status reports tell you the work is happening. They don’t tell you the work is right.
The Real Choice
When you find yourself facing a high-risk, unfamiliar piece of work — a new module, a new integration, a new vendor relationship — you only have two real options.
You find someone who already has unconscious competence on that specific type of work, and you use them as an advisor, an owner, or an implementor. Or you accept the slower path: your own team builds the competence the hard way, through time and failure, learning the rungs in real conditions.
The second path is sometimes the right one — if this is a capability you intend to own permanently, repeated investment in failure is how organisations actually build internal strength. But if this is a one-off endeavour — your one ERP implementation, your one disaster recovery plan, your one system this decade — choosing the slow path is not patience. It’s an expensive way to discover, mid-program, who was actually on which rung the whole time.
The ladder doesn’t care how the contract reads or how the pitch sounded. It only cares whether the person in front of you has done this exact work before, enough times that doing it well no longer requires effort.
Before you sign anything, ask the question. You’ll save yourself the cost of finding out at go-live.
