Unlearning

The deliberate process of releasing practices, assumptions, and mental models that no longer fit current conditions. Unlike learning—which adds capability—unlearning requires letting go of what once worked. This is uncomfortable because it challenges identity: the competencies that built a leader's credibility may be exactly what needs to change.

Why Unlearning Is Harder Than Learning

Learning feels like growth—acquiring new skills, expanding capability, becoming more. Unlearning feels like loss—abandoning hard-won expertise, admitting that what you knew is no longer valid, becoming less certain.

This asymmetry explains why organizations learn new practices far more readily than they abandon old ones. Adding a new tool is easy. Recognizing that your proven approach has become a liability requires confronting uncomfortable truths about identity and past success.

Unlearning is not forgetting. The knowledge remains accessible. It's recognizing when context has shifted enough that previous success logic becomes a constraint, and consciously choosing different approaches despite the discomfort of abandoning familiar patterns.

The Identity Problem

For individuals, core competencies become identity. A leader known for analytical rigor faces an identity crisis when told that analysis is insufficient. A manager whose career was built on operational control struggles to embrace distributed decision-making. The skills that built their reputation feel like who they are, not just what they do.

For organizations, unlearning challenges collective identity and institutional memory. "This is how we do things here" embodies accumulated learning. Questioning those practices feels like disrespecting the people who built them.

What Makes Unlearning Difficult

Success validation. The practices targeted for unlearning worked. They produced results, built careers, and earned recognition. The evidence of their value is concrete. The evidence that they've become liabilities is typically ambiguous—early warning signals, not definitive proof.

Sunk costs. Organizations have invested in infrastructure, training, and processes built around the existing approach. People have invested in developing expertise. Abandoning that investment feels wasteful.

Uncertainty about alternatives. Even when current practices clearly aren't working, alternatives seem risky. The devil you know feels safer than the devil you don't.

Social pressure. Colleagues continue using the old approaches. Questioning shared practices creates social friction. The person who suggests unlearning can seem disloyal or arrogant.

Example: The Expert's Dilemma

A supply chain executive built her career on optimizing for efficiency. She pioneered just-in-time inventory practices that reduced costs by millions. Her expertise was recognized industry-wide.

Then came disruption: pandemic, geopolitical tension, climate events. The lean supply chains she designed proved fragile. Customers who once praised her efficiency now demanded resilience.

The required unlearning was profound. Not just adopting new practices, but releasing the mental model that defined her professional identity. Efficiency wasn't wrong—it was incomplete. The conditions that made pure efficiency optimal had changed.

Many experts in her position double down, arguing that disruptions are temporary and efficiency will return to prominence. They protect their identity by denying the shift. The executive who can unlearn—who can recognize that her expertise addressed yesterday's problem—adapts and remains valuable.

Example: The Startup That Grew Up

A technology startup achieved success through speed and improvisation. Decisions happened in hallways. Code shipped without extensive testing. Customer problems were solved through heroic individual effort.

These practices were adaptive—perfectly suited to a small team finding product-market fit. But as the company grew, they became liabilities. Hallway decisions excluded remote employees. Untested code created reliability problems. Heroic effort led to burnout.

The required unlearning was painful. The founders had to release the identity of "scrappy startup" that had made them successful. Long-tenured employees had to unlearn the informal processes that felt like the company's soul. The very culture that built the company needed to evolve—not because it was wrong, but because the company had changed.

Creating Conditions for Unlearning

Organizations can make unlearning easier:

Normalize context shifts. When "things change" is part of the culture, releasing old approaches feels natural rather than disloyal.

Separate practices from identity. Help people see themselves as learners who use tools, not as defined by specific expertise.

Celebrate adaptive letting-go. Recognize people who identify practices to abandon, not just those who create new ones.

Create safe experiments. Allow people to try new approaches in low-stakes situations before abandoning proven methods entirely.

Acknowledge the loss. Unlearning involves real grief. The old ways worked, and releasing them hurts. Pretending otherwise makes the process harder.