You must unlearn what you have learned.
—Yoda
As Serena Williams assessed her devastating string of losses on the court, she feared she might be nearing the end of her fabled career. In 2012, the average age for women Grand Slam tournament players was just 24 years old.1 Serena was almost 31 years old, she had been a professional tennis player for half her life, and she hadn’t won a Grand Slam event in two years. The trend was not a positive one.
It had been a good run, but according to reports in the media, Serena wanted to win just one more Grand Slam tournament before her career was over for good.2 She had very clear aspirations, but she wasn’t living up to them. It was time to stop letting fear hold her back, and instead focus on the outcome she wanted to achieve—to win again. “I decided I was going to die trying,” she said. “I just had to go back on court, no matter what. It would have been weird if I hadn’t tried.”3
That one last shot came from a very unlikely place, remarkably, and from the most unlikely of sources.
Immediately after her devastating loss at the French Open, Serena looked for a court in Paris where she could practice and unwind. She found her way to a tennis academy for juniors owned and run by Patrick Mouratoglou, who also served as a coach there. While Mouratoglou had coached a handful of mid-ranked players—he was then coaching 37th-ranked men’s player Grigor Dimitrov—he didn’t come from a classic coaching background, and he had never before coached a player of Serena’s caliber.
Patrick’s father had founded EDF Énergies Nouvelles, a renewable energy company that made him one of the richest men in France. At age 15, Patrick was a middle-rung junior player with dreams of turning pro, but his parents insisted that he instead focus on his studies so that he would one day be able to step into his father’s shoes at EDF. Patrick complied with his parents’ wishes. He quit tennis, doubled down on his studies, and eventually took a position at EDF Énergies Nouvelles, where he learned the ins and outs of business and leadership.
However, the siren song of tennis continued to beckon, and at age 26, Patrick quit the family business to open his own youth tennis academy. Says Mouratoglou about the difficult conversation he had with his father, “I told him, ‘I’m sorry. It is interesting, but it’s not a passion for me, and I need passion in my life—I really need my freedom.’”4
Serena arrived at Mouratoglou’s academy, and Patrick watched her practice for 45 minutes. After observing how she moved around the court, how she hit the ball, how she served and volleyed, he gave Serena his unvarnished feedback. “Every time you hit, you’re off balance, which makes you miss a lot,” he told her. “Also, you lose power because [your] body weight doesn’t go through [the shots], and you’re not moving up, so your game is slow.”5
She was curious about Patrick’s insights and said. “Let’s work on it.”6 And that’s exactly what they did. The pair trained together every day for the rest of the week, and then Serena returned home to the United States to prepare for Wimbledon.
Just days before the Wimbledon tournament was set to begin, Serena made the decision to take on relatively unproven Frenchman Patrick Mouratoglou as her coach. He would step into the role that her father, Richard Williams, had filled for both Serena and her sister Venus from the time they first held tennis racquets in their hands. What followed was truly extraordinary.
Serena won her next 19 matches and took Wimbledon and the US Open, along with a gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics (defeating Maria Sharapova in straight sets) and the season-closing WTA Tour Championships, trouncing Sharapova (again, in straight sets). She ended the season the number-three woman tennis player in the world.
Serena Williams was back, with a vengeance.
When Serena decided to make the coaching switch from her father to Patrick Mouratoglou, she was taking a huge risk. In the world of tennis coaching, which emphasized molding players to a rigid standard set by the coach, Mouratoglou’s methods were seen as too unconventional, even radical. Patrick learned skills from the time he spent in his father’s business, and then adapted and applied them to his coaching. He took a holistic approach to coaching, not just the game but the mindset and mentality—what many people highlight now as one of Serena’s greatest strengths.
In Patrick’s words:
My goal has always been to enable every player to maximize his potential through individualized training. My method consists in being able to connect with your player . . . I don't believe in a method that would fit everyone but more in one that is based on being able to build a personalized plan for each player that will lead him/her to success. My job is about adaptation and not about repeating a [one-size-fits-all] pattern.7
Both Williams and Mouratoglou were out of their comfort zones, but this was necessary to find the breakthrough in her game. They both had something to prove, a purpose that drove them. Serena wanted to show the world she wasn’t done—that she could win another Grand Slam—and Patrick wanted to prove to the tennis establishment that it was wrong about his coaching methods. If the partnership failed, Williams’s career could have very well ended with retirement and Mouratoglou would have returned to the relative obscurity of his youth tennis academy, both chastened by an experiment gone wrong in a very public way.
Choosing Patrick put Serena squarely in an unfamiliar, unknown, and uncertain situation. She knew exactly what to expect from her father as her lifelong coach, but not from Mouratoglou, whom she had personally known for only a few weeks before she made the decision to hire him. But Serena knew it was time to let go and move away from what she always had previously done in search of improved performance—and one last Grand Slam win.
With Mouratoglou’s help, Serena Williams began the process of unlearning the methods that were no longer bringing her the success she so desperately wanted, while relearning new techniques and tactics on the court—leading to breakthroughs in her performance.
They thought big (one last Grand Slam win) but started small, introducing a few tiny tweaks to existing routines—nothing major—such as working on speeding up Serena’s footwork so that she could set up for shots and hit the ball earlier. As each small step showed signs of progress, the trust between them grew stronger with each passing day. This gave Serena the confidence she needed to move away from the comfort and certainty of her tried-and-trusted methods and tackle new challenges and win.
In addition, Patrick helped Serena see the blind spots in her game that she was unaware of, sparking new perspectives, new thinking, and new behaviors. He convinced Serena, for example, of the importance of pre-match preparation, including analyzing each of her opponents, exploring probable game scenarios, and developing tactics to be used during the course of her match. According to Mouratoglou, “The more information you have, the more you are ready to play against them.” But, as he points out, “I don’t know if she believed in [this approach] before or not, but she was not doing it.”8
Serena listened to the advice of her coach, and she adapted her approach to the game—taking small steps and introducing new behaviors. Says Mouratoglou about Serena’s drive to keep shaking up her game, “She hates to do the same things all the time. She’s a person who loves to learn and loves to progress, and it’s very important to add new things to her game.”9 In short, Serena unlearned, relearned, and then experienced breakthroughs—again and again—leading her to higher and higher performance.
Each breakthrough developed deeper resilience in Serena’s mind, reinforcing the strong belief she had in her ability to come back from difficult and losing positions time and time again. She developed a system to unlearn what was holding her back and win when she most needed to. According to tennis performance psychologist, Jim Loehr, it’s clear to Serena’s opponents when she is ready to come back from behind and win. Says Loehr, “All of a sudden she walks differently, she acts differently, and her opponent knows it’s over.”10
Serena’s deep well of resilience also equates to extraordinary results. When women tennis players lose the opening set, they have on average only a 25 percent chance of coming back to win.11 When Serena loses the first set of a match, however, she’s almost as likely to win the match as she is to lose it. She’s 90-92 in her career when dropping the first set—almost double the statistical probability of a comeback succeeding. Better still, if a match goes the distance to three sets, Serena wins more than 70 percent of the time, posting a 150-59 record.12
During the course of the 2002–2003 seasons, Serena held all four Grand Slam singles titles simultaneously, making her one of only a very small handful of tennis players in history to achieve this feat—labeled the “Serena Slam” by the media. After bouncing back from her defeat at the French Open in 2012, Serena thought bigger, and set her sights on an even more audacious aspiration, a second Serena Slam. This became her new purpose, and she achieved it during the 2014–2015 season—12 years after her first—becoming the only person ever to do so twice.
At her side? Coach Patrick Mouratoglou. Said Serena, “After I won my first Grand Slam with Patrick in 2012, I knew my life and my career had changed. At the 2017 Australian Open we broke the record by winning my twenty-third major—our tenth Grand Slam title together. Twenty-three is just the start of us. As he told me, why limit myself?”13
Since losing in that first round in Paris, and working with Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams has made it to the finals in 14 of the 22 Grand Slam tournaments in which she has participated,* winning 10 of them—the 2017 Australian Open while eight weeks pregnant!14 It’s no wonder many consider Serena to be not just the best woman tennis player in the history of the sport, but the best tennis player period.
While they may not be as accomplished on the court as Serena Williams, leaders, executives, managers, teams, and businesses often face the same situation Serena did—a point at which doing the things that brought them success in the past no longer work. To succeed, they must unlearn, relearn, and break through.
This is the heart of my unlearning system, and in the next chapter, you’ll discover how it can help you break through the barriers that hold you back to achieve the extraordinary results you seek in every aspect of your work and life.
While we consider the idea of unlearning in a business context, it is something that permeates our lives—and human history—perhaps without us even realizing it.
About 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire ruled the Western world. During its prime, it stretched from the capital of Rome (at the time, the largest city in the world) to present-day England in the north, North Africa in the south, and west and east through much of Europe and the Middle East. It occupied more than 1.9 million square miles and included approximately 20 percent of the world’s population. For almost 500 years, the Roman Empire was the greatest military, economic, and cultural power the earth had ever seen.
For centuries, scholars have mused over what it was that brought the Romans such tremendous success. Was it the empire’s visionary leaders? Its prime location on the Tiber River? A happy confluence of historical events? Perhaps not. In 1734, French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu explained that the Roman Empire’s success could in great part be traced to its unique ability to adapt to new circumstances in its environment by unlearning what had brought it success in the past. According to Montesquieu:
It should be noted that the main reason for the Romans becoming masters of the world was that, having fought successively against all peoples, they always gave up their own practices as soon as they found better ones.15
So as you see, unlearning has been with us for a very long time, as have the benefits unlearning provides. There was much scientific research done on the topic of unlearning in the 1980s and’90s. Ironically, however, we seem to have unlearned it!
Beginning in the 1980s, research interest in a concept called the learning organization gained momentum. Building a learning organization—in which employees and the organization itself could learn more at a greater velocity—was seen as an important competitive advantage in a global economy that was increasingly knowledge-based. The idea of the learning organization exploded into the mainstream with the publication of Peter Senge’s seminal book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, in 1990.
In his book, Senge presented what he termed the Laws of Systems Thinking:
1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions.”
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
6. Faster is slower.
7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
8. Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
9. You can have your cake and eat it too—but not at once.
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
11. There is no blame.16
Lifelong learning was assumed to be necessary for high-performance people and organizations. And so, while American business executives and managers jumped on the learning organization bandwagon in droves, researchers found that there was a related concept that needed to be considered by the men and women who lead organizations: unlearning.
One of the first references to the idea of organizational unlearning was in an article by Bo Hedberg in 1981. According to Hedberg, “Knowledge grows, and simultaneously it becomes obsolete as reality changes. Understanding involves both learning new knowledge and discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge.”17
In other words, gaining new knowledge first requires unlearning knowledge that is no longer of use or that has become outdated and an obstacle in the way of our forward progress. It’s this unlearning that often goes missing in leaders and the organizations they lead. You only have to look at the changing of the S&P 500 guard since 1990 to find evidence of who listened and applied both lessons and who did not. The people leading the companies that are winning today—Apple, Amazon, Google, and other tech firms—took these lessons to heart, while the losers, including Sears, Lehman Brothers, and General Electric (the last remaining original member of the S&P 500, which departed the list on June 26, 2018, having topped the list as recently as 2005, and until 2013 was still in the top five) did not.
Disruption does not actually apply to organizations. The truth is it applies to individuals. Consider what great leaders and the great companies they lead have in common. They have cultivated a capability within themselves to innovate, adapt, and anticipate the future. They invest in experiences that enable them to grow; they seek situations that are uncomfortable, uncertain, and the results unknown. They create mechanisms to experiment quickly, and safely gather new information to evolve into something better. They succeed over the long term by not holding on to what once brought them success. How they succeed isn’t magical; it’s methodical. It’s not down to serendipity or luck—they have intentional systems.
In my own experience working all around the world with executives and teams—from disruptive start-ups to the globally renowned behemoths of the Fortune 500—I’ve seen firsthand the struggle both great and growing leaders face as they seek to lead innovation in their markets. It prompted me to coauthor my first book, the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale, for the Eric Ries Lean Series. It gave me the opportunity to interview, work with, advise, and coach hundreds of business and technology leaders and to research thousands of companies and case studies to discover what leads to higher performance and outstanding accomplishments.
I’ve seen what enables certain leaders to accelerate and what makes others stop in their tracks. In times past, an individual’s knowledge would last a lifetime. Indeed, knowledge would be passed down for many generations and still be highly useful. Yet, as the pace of innovation increases, once-useful knowledge now becomes rapidly obsolete—hence the need to consider a system of unlearning. Exceptional leaders have discovered it’s not how smart they are, how much they know, how long they’ve been in an industry, or what they have learned. It’s the ability to recognize when to unlearn and when to let go of past success and their outdated thinking and behaviors, and innovate new mindsets and methods to achieve extraordinary results.
Yes, learning is one part, but the answer is not only to learn. We struggle even more to know what to let go of, move away from, and unlearn.
In the next chapter, we’ll consider exactly how you can leverage the power of unlearning to your own advantage—and that of your teams and organizations.
*Valid to 2018.