“You’re better at it than I am.”

Strategic incompetence

Strategic incompetence is a repeated pattern in which someone avoids learning, claims they cannot manage a task or does it in a way that leaves another person repeatedly taking over responsibilities they could reasonably share.

Responsibility shifts without being openly refused. Asking for help can become more work than doing the task yourself, while planning, remembering, correcting and completing it continue to fall to you.

You may stop asking, lower your expectations, redo tasks or carry both the responsibility and the work of keeping track of it. Over time, doing everything yourself may feel easier than negotiating the same responsibility again.

A genuine skill gap, unfamiliar task, disability, executive-function difficulty, limited capacity or different standard is not automatically strategic incompetence. The distinction is whether the difficulty can be discussed, accommodated and learned from—or whether responsibility repeatedly returns to you while attempts to redistribute it produce no usable change.

You do not need to decide what it is. You can note the date and what happened, and read it back later.

One moment rarely tells the whole story. Look at what repeats over time—and what happens when harm, disagreement or a boundary is named.