You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
—C. S. Lewis
I’m excited to see how Serena Williams applies the Cycle of Unlearning to her next challenge either on or off the court. I sense she has the system in place to achieve whatever she sets her sights on, be it breaking Margaret Court’s record of 24 individual Grand Slam titles, launching new businesses, or more.
I also have to wonder if the Cycle of Unlearning that the small Disney team adopted as it developed and rolled out its innovative new MagicBand in a secluded corner of Walt Disney World hasn’t leaked out to the rest of the company’s Parks and Resorts organization. Based on the most recent financial results of the Walt Disney Company, I have good reason to believe they have.
Overall, Disney’s financial performance for 2017 was extremely disappointing for investors and top management alike, with a 1 percent decline in revenue from 2016 to 2017 (from $55.6 billion to $55.1 billion) and a 6 percent drop in operating income (from $15.7 billion to $14.8 billion). In fact, every major business segment except for one underperformed in 2017. From 2016 to 2017, Consumer Products and Interactive Media revenue declined 13 percent (from $5.5 billion to $4.8 billion), Studio Entertainment revenue declined 11 percent (from $9.4 billion to $8.4 billion), and revenue for Media Networks dropped 1 percent (from $23.7 billion to $23.5 billion).1
The one shining star? Parks and Resorts.
While the revenues of every other segment decreased from 2016 to 2017, the revenue for Parks and Resorts increased 8 percent—from $17.0 billion to $18.4 billion. And operating income increased at an even greater clip, jumping 14 percent from 2016 to 2017 ($3.3 billion to $3.8 billion).2
While I cannot directly attribute the stellar results posted by Parks and Resorts for 2017 solely to the prompt provided by the MagicBands team, I suspect that as team members moved on to other parts of the organization, they brought the Cycle of Unlearning along with them. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger personally approved the MagicBands project, and he provided its leadership team with the remit to unlearn to achieve extraordinary results. Iger could clearly see the benefit of this new way of working with each small step the team took, and he championed it. This caused a ripple effect that swept across the Parks and Resorts business segment, and I believe someday it will flow throughout the entirety of the Disney organization—lifting it to even greater success in the future.
In the case of IAG—the parent company of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, LEVEL, Vueling, Avios Group Limited and IAG Cargo—I know the team of six Catapult leaders returned to their companies to champion the Cycle of Unlearning with new ways of working and to provide coaching to others throughout the organization to make an impact and contribute toward their extraordinary results.
Numerous other executives and leaders inspired by their stories have joined me in ExecCamps to break their models and reinvent their businesses and themselves. From airports to telcos, banks to healthcare companies, and more, the leaders of tomorrow don’t fear the future but are instead inventing it. It’s inspiring to work with these leaders in such uncomfortable, uncertain, and unknown domains.
Ultimately, the desired outcome of adopting the Cycle of Unlearning is to shift how we think, perceive, and experience the world; to gather new information in new ways that are no longer constrained by our past successes; and to use that information to improve our decision making and actions. When we unlearn, we relearn a system of effectiveness. The purpose is to question our assumptions—as Eleanor Roosevelt cautioned, never mistaking knowledge for wisdom—and challenge our understanding to gain valuable lessons from what we have learned and adapt.
The telco executive team unlearned their mobile phone strategy thanks to a $200 pre-paid credit card and the experience of their own service as a customer. The executive from IAG unlearned how to co-create outstanding products by listening to the feedback of his customer. The bank leadership team unlearned their incentive structure and its unintended consequences to achieve their desired organizational-level outcomes.
The question is what behaviors and mindsets currently limit your capabilities? Will you unlearn in order to relearn new behaviors and break through to extraordinary results?
Unlearning is a system that requires dedicated time and focus to achieve mastery, but the effort is well worth it. It is important to step slightly outside our comfort zone—our toes barely touching the bottom as we go out of our depth—to seek opportunities to experience new ways of thinking, acting, and working. With deliberate practice, reflection, and repetition, you will improve your performance, understand new patterns, and build that mastery. You will reinforce your lessons learned, coach, mentor, and bring others along the journey. You will be able to design systems of work that include and enhance virtuous cycles of unlearning to have profound impact on your customers, colleagues, and yourself.
The most powerful part of the Cycle of Unlearning is the simple fact that there will always be more to unlearn, more to relearn, and more breakthroughs to take both you and your organization to the next level. Our world will continue to increase in speed, complexity, and innovation at an exponential rate, and organizations—and the people who lead them—must keep up to survive, and get ahead to thrive.
As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” These words are just as true today as they were 1,500 years ago.
Naysayers will tell you it’s not possible, citing the size of the challenge, the belief that people won’t change, and the many obstacles that will get in your way and stop you. They’ll raise endless reasons why it wouldn’t work, couldn’t work, or has been tried before. Turn these obstacles into opportunities. Feed them into the Cycle of Unlearning and break through.
Many erroneously believe that creating new behaviors requires first changing the mindset—that if we tell people to start thinking differently, they will start acting differently. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Unlearning does not lead with words; it leads with action. This means thinking big, but making small steps toward the outcome we desire. And it also means leading the unlearning ourselves, thereby providing the example for others on our team and in our organization to follow by adapting our own behavior. While objections are indeed challenges, the most serious barriers are to be found in organizational culture, leadership, and strategy—all of which can be affected by unlearning outdated and legacy behaviors in order to relearn better behaviors and break through. You tackle that challenge by starting with yourself, not trying to fix others. Model the behaviors you wish to see, and others will follow.
By unlearning the way we behave, our actions begin to inform the way we observe, experience, and eventually see the world. This new perspective of seeing and experiencing the world differently impacts the way we think about it. People do not change their mental models of the world by speaking about it; they need to experience the change to believe, feel, and see evidence of it.
Remember, unlearning is the process of letting go, reframing, and moving away from once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit our success. It’s not forgetting, removing, or discarding knowledge or experience; it’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively engaging in taking in new information to inform effective decision making and action.
The experience of the Disney MagicBand team is very similar to the experience of the six senior IAG leaders who were pulled out of their organization for eight weeks to unlearn. Just as Disney knew that it couldn’t rely on one-day innovation off-sites or massive multiyear transformational programs to create extraordinary outcomes or any lasting behavior or mindset breakthroughs, so too did the leadership of IAG realize that it would have to do something quite different than it had been doing to drive innovation and extraordinary results. This something different was to engage in the Cycle of Unlearning.
Similarly, Capital One knew that by reinventing their ways of working—and themselves—they could make a tremendous difference in the organization’s outcomes. By taking on challenges outside their comfort zones and knowledge thresholds to discover, experiment with, and use new methods, tools, and techniques, they would enable employees at all levels of the organization to break free of fixed behaviors and myopic mindsets.
For Jeff Bezos, at Amazon, it’s always Day One. When employees move past Day One, they become complacent and fearful, relying more on the comfort of the status quo instead of constantly seeking new frontiers and courageously leaning into the discomfort of the unknown. The former is the pathway to organizational decline and death. The latter is the pathway to greatness.
If your purpose is leading unlearning in your team or organization, take inspiration from them. Think big and start small. Identify what needs to be unlearned and seek out the right people and leadership support. Demonstrate that the company’s own people can achieve extraordinary results and their own aspirations and outcomes, with new ways of working. Share your vision, mistakes, and actions. Model the new behaviors you wish to see.
Most people will never put themselves in uncomfortable situations or embrace uncertainty and the unknown. Why not? Because the pull toward mediocrity is too strong. Much of the thinking is small-minded with little action. Many people are overly concerned with beating their personal rivals, usually through manipulation and politics. Rarely will these people achieve extraordinary results. Instead, focus your time and effort on what you can do to grow and have impact yourself.
As you consider the many different challenges, aspirations, and outcomes you want to set for yourself, I believe the most important ones are experiential learning and personal transformation. I have found that if you’re always chasing success, it will constantly elude you. But if you always prioritize incredible personal growth, impact, and paradigm-shifting experiences, success will gravitate toward you as if you were a magnet.
So, choose not to be mediocre. Choose a life of greatness—at work, at home, in your community, and in the world. Remember: Think big, but start small. Take the tiny steps to achieve the outcomes you desire. Step by step, you can and will achieve all that you want—maybe even more than you can imagine.
Recognize when your behaviors and mindset aren’t working or living up to your expectations or could be better. Take action by trying a different approach without a guaranteed successful outcome. This takes something very special: It takes courage and a willingness to be vulnerable to the possibility of failure. It is at this precise intersection that true greatness occurs.
As we reach the final pages of this book, the one thing I most want you to remember is that the Cycle of Unlearning begins with you. Think about what you want to unlearn for yourself and commit to start. There is no ideal state or moment or situation, and waiting for existential threats or crises is not fun. Instead, adopt the practice of unlearning intentionally and habitually as we do breathing and living. As Jeff Bezos says, “There is no Day Two—every day is Day One.”
Don’t wait a moment longer to define the aspiration or outcome you most want to accomplish. Start tomorrow, or even better, right now—it’s easy to do!
Write down the aspiration or outcome you want to achieve, then quantify and constrain it. Ask someone on your team, a colleague, or friend, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you think I am doing at _____________ (the aspiration or outcome you want to achieve)?”
This technique was taught to me by executive coach Sabrina Braham.3 She highlights that the human brain can’t adequately calibrate typical qualitative feedback responses such as “poor,” “fair,” “good,” and “excellent.” Those words don’t have any precise meanings for us. However, when someone gives us quantitative feedback—a percentage, rate, or ratio—the brain immediately understands, and we know where to focus our effort. For example, “You’re a 6 out of 10”—in essence, 60 percent of the way toward your aspiration or outcome.
Listen to what your collaborator, co-creator, or customer has to say. Ask them what behaviors are helping you get there or holding you back. Ask them how you could get half a point better. What is the one small step you could take to improve, get better results, and unlearn?
Think about the first step you’ll take as a tiny habit that you can introduce to your routine the next time you do it. Check back with them later to see if you’ve actually achieved the breakthrough you’re looking for—not only with them, but with your own way of seeing the world differently. And then start to build virtuous cycles that build your effectiveness and lead to increasingly better outcomes with each iteration and Cycle of Unlearning you complete.
I can guarantee that if you take that approach, you’ll get extraordinary results.