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How to Unlearn
When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.
—Marie Kondō
Most leaders today know they must constantly transform the way they do business—making decisions much more quickly, responding to fast-changing markets with greater agility, better addressing customer needs, and more. One of the great problems with moving away from old ways of doing business to new is that the neural pathways of the men and women who lead these organizations have become fixed and rigid over time. Leaders get caught in a myopic view of the world around them, mainly informed and biased by their daily field of operations.
The push for immediate results, coupled with overloaded schedules and pressure to execute decisions and deliver faster, provide them with few opportunities to reflect on results. Plans get interrupted by problems, and context switching becomes an uncontrolled hidden cost. Many leaders never have the time to just think—to deeply consider problems and potential alternative options. As a result, they implement tactical, point solutions that optimize short-term business efficiency and revenue capture, but ultimately lose sight of the bigger vision, challenges, and experiences for their customers. They fail to learn—or more important, unlearn—the behaviors and mindsets that are limiting their effectiveness and trapping them and their business in a cycle that has little left to give. All too often this motion is mistaken for progress.
Believe me, it’s not.
When leaders do find a moment to take time out, attend the occasional innovation off-site, weekend retreat, or week-long program at a prestigious, internationally renowned university, business school, or association, they return to the workplace brimming with new ideas and initiatives. But in most cases, they quickly revert to their previous conditioned and comfortable patterns of behavior and thinking, further crushed by the reality they face upon their return.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that most training and development efforts in businesses today routinely fail to hit the mark. A recent Harvard Business Review article points out that American businesses spend a tremendous amount of money on employee training and education. In 2015, this number was estimated to be approximately $160 billion in the United States, and $356 billion globally. Yet only one in four attendees say the training was critical to business outcomes and “For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.”1
Unlearning is different. It isn’t a one-and-done event—it’s a system: a system of letting go and adapting to the situational reality of the present as we look to the future. It’s recognizing that whatever it is that we have previously done may no longer be useful at this moment. Your mission is to develop the capability to know when to move away from outdated information, take in new information to inform your thinking, and adapt your behaviors as a result.
Courage is the recognition that what you are doing is not working for you, letting go, and taking action to do what is needed to progress. The first breakthrough is the realization that you must, in fact, unlearn. By identifying the aspiration or outcome you wish to achieve—paired with the deliberate practice to get there—you can start to move toward your desired state and achieve extraordinary results.
The Cycle of Unlearning
The system of unlearning is based on a three-step approach to individual and collective growth that I have dubbed the Cycle of Unlearning (Figure 2.1). I have developed this system over years of working with, advising, and coaching outstanding executives, employees, and teams. I will show you how high performers use this system naturally, even unintentionally, and tell you how you can harness it into a conscious act of cultivating your character and capabilities for growth and impact.
FIGURE 2.1. The Cycle of Unlearning
Adopting the Cycle of Unlearning doesn’t rely on being smart, or lucky, or desperate, or all of the above. It relies only on you—your courage and commitment to use it intentionally in your work and your life to achieve extraordinary results.
Step One: Unlearn
There are a variety of reasons why individuals get stuck doing the same things over and over again, instead of leading innovation in their markets. The main one is the erroneous belief that doing what brought you success today will bring you success tomorrow. Unfortunately, the systems, models, and methods that work today can actually limit your ability to change—and succeed—tomorrow.
The core premise of this book assumes you possess an eager desire to learn, and a willingness to unlearn, when you recognize once-useful mindsets and behaviors are now limiting your current and future success. Are you as an individual open to the idea that what you’re doing might not be optimal, but instead outdated or obsolete? This is the self-awareness, the humility, the curiosity required to seek growth. And this is why we must make space and time for new information to come in.
Do you have the courage to recognize that what you are doing is not working, be willing to accept it, let go, and try something different? What aspirations do you have but yet feel unclear about where to start? Have you set expectations of yourself but not delivered your desired outcome, citing excuses or hardships you know you’re unwilling to face? What challenge are you struggling with, and you’ve tried all your tools yet still seem stuck? These are clear signals you are limiting your performance or have hit a local maximum, and that it’s time to begin the Cycle of Unlearning.
Unlearning does not lead with words; it leads with action. You can’t just say, “Yeah, of course I want to unlearn.” You must first embrace your purpose by clarifying your why and your what. Why exactly do you want to unlearn? What specifically do you want to unlearn?
Do you believe this is important? Are you open to it? Are you curious? Do you agree there could be a better answer other than your own, an alternative way to achieve better results? When you can answer “yes” to these questions, then it’s time to focus on the specifics of what you want to unlearn.
This first step in the Cycle of Unlearning requires courage, self-awareness, and humility to accept that your own beliefs, mindsets, or behaviors are limiting your potential and current performance and that you must consciously move away from them. This allows you to be open to new approaches and get unstuck. The key to unlocking the capability to continuously adapt and affect your environment and personal development starts with you. By identifying the aspiration or outcome you wish to achieve—quantifying and holding yourself accountable for it—you can start to move toward your desired state and achieve extraordinary results.
As Einstein famously said, “We cannot resolve a problem by using the same thinking that created it.” The same is true as we unlearn. It’s only through courage, curiosity, and identifying what we desire to unlearn that we can take the next step: to relearn.
Step Two: Relearn
As you unlearn your current limiting but ingrained methods, behaviors, and thinking, you can take in new data, information, and perspectives. And by considering all this new input, you naturally challenge your existing mental models of the world. It is by leveraging these insights that you can seek improvement, adaptation, and growth. By exploring difficult tasks, you will discover a tremendous amount about yourself. You’ll understand your mind and body’s natural resistance, as well as the discipline and power of deliberate practice to overcome internal and external obstacles to succeed. You’ll build your own personal resilience and self-belief.
But there are immense challenges to relearning effectively, and we create many of these challenges ourselves. First, you must be willing to adapt and be open to information that goes against your inherent beliefs—that may be at odds with what you have always been told or taught to do. Second, you may need to learn how to learn again. Finally, you must create an environment for relearning to happen in a meaningful, yet often challenging, space outside your existing comfort zone.
The first step in the Cycle of Unlearning demonstrates you recognize the need to innovate. However, it’s in this second step that you build confidence, capability, and momentum. You’re relearning—deliberately.
What you’re trying to do is get better information and learn to see, sense, and listen differently, to respond and act differently. Relearning is the space where you can experiment—where you can get to grips with uncertainty—through deliberate, practical, and experiential learning.
The prerequisite to relearning is questioning your current beliefs for what you consider to be possible. You must think big and challenge your assumptions of the world. But while you think big, you must also start small. It’s creating the bounded context of relearning—small steps and experiments that create the safe-to-fail environment required to break through.
I demonstrate in examples, client stories, and case studies referenced throughout this book that safety—be it psychological, physical, or economic—has been proven to be a leading indicator for higher performance and extraordinary results.2 Especially psychological safety, defined by Boston University’s William A. Khan as “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status, or career.” Creating a space to allow experimentation to happen in a controlled and recoverable manner, with safe-to-fail experiments and a high level of psychological safety, enables people to make adjustments to their existing behaviors, explore the edges of their universe, and start to grow.
That’s the reason we think big but start small—so we’re not taking unrecoverable risks. You’re operating outside your comfort zone, but neither you nor your organization or team will trigger catastrophic consequences if it doesn’t work out as predicted. In fact, you should not expect it to as you take your first steps into the unknown. I will show you how to create a safe environment and design safe-to-fail experiments as you relearn what is necessary to achieve the final step of the transformation: breakthrough.
Step Three: Breakthrough
Once you—whatever your position, from the C-suite to the shop floor—learn how to relearn and open yourself up to new information flows, networks, and systems from every possible source, you are poised to develop the kind of breakthrough thinking that has the potential to vault you into the lead. Breakthrough is the result of unlearning and then relearning—it’s the new information and insights that come out of the first two steps of the Cycle of Unlearning. The information and insights are extremely powerful because they inform and guide your behaviors, perspective, and mindset.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve interviewed executives and leaders in organizations whose first comment is, “What we really need is to change the mindset here.” Leaders believe they simply need to tell people to think differently, and they will act differently. This is a fallacy that must, in fact, be unlearned. The way to think differently is to act differently. When you act differently, you start to see and experience the world differently, impacting your mindset as a result. And because you’re realizing the benefits of adapting your behaviors and gaining new perspectives that impact your mindset, you become open to unlearning your behaviors more often. It’s an accelerant.
As we break free of our existing mental models and methods, we learn to let go of the past to achieve extraordinary results. We realize that as the world is constantly evolving, innovating, and progressing, so too must we. Persisting with the same thinking and behaviors inhibits ongoing and future success. Our breakthroughs provide an opportunity to reflect on the lessons we have learned from relearning and provide a springboard for tackling bigger and more audacious challenges.
This process can be as simple as asking yourself what went well, not so well, and what you would do differently if you were to try and unlearn the same challenge again. Using this information and insight and feeding it forward to future loops of the Cycle of Unlearning means every loop of the cycle results in deeper insight, greater impact, and growth.
After breakthrough, the cycle starts all over again as leaders push forward with new innovations, new ideas, and new ways of doing business. The constant danger, however, is that complacency may set in and the commitment to keep pushing forward may waver. Slowly but surely, we can start to settle—slipping back into our old habits, instead of amplifying the virtuous cycle toward further success.
Unlearning is not an event. It is ongoing and continuous—a habit and deliberate practice in itself. By breaking through, what we’re really trying to achieve is: (1) reflect on our results; (2) make our course corrections; and (3) use the new information and momentum to keep accelerating through the loop again, leading to new breakthroughs.
What you put into the Cycle of Unlearning is up to you and depends on your personal aspirations and outcomes for growth. The remarkable power of this system is revealed when you start with one small challenge you face or aspiration you want to achieve, and then think about how you can apply it to ever larger and more complex challenges or aspirations until finally—everything.
You can use this system to solve all sorts of problems and challenges or leverage any kind of opportunity. In doing so, you’ll learn how to make better decisions when you’re faced with difficult circumstances and uncertain situations. People often think the only way to achieve big results is to start big, go big, bet big. This is not true. Instead, think big but start small. Try many alternatives. You can make lots of small bets—not just one big bet—to find the breakthrough that is most impactful for you.
Failure is to do nothing. It’s to not act. To do anything means it will result in some new, even surprising information or insight; so, no matter what, it’s always a positive result for you. You’re always going to learn something, discover something, or invalidate something.
As philosopher Eric Hoffer said, “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Unlearning in Action
International Airlines Group (IAG)—the parent company of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, LEVEL, Vueling, Avios Group Limited, and IAG Cargo—is the third largest airline group in Europe and the sixth largest in the world, based on revenue of €22.9 billion in 2017. It has more than 63,000 employees, 547 aircraft, and carries some 105 million passengers each year.3 A few years ago, the company came to the realization that sending its executives and senior managers to short training workshops or classes was not enough to move the needle sufficiently to disrupt their behaviors and mindsets. They rightly believed that bringing about real transformation would require the much deeper and longer commitment of its most experienced leaders.
IAG asked, “How can we think big and start small to have a systemic and sustained impact on how our leaders lead and on how we lead our industry?”
Their answer? What if six of IAG’s most senior leaders were taken out of cross-company business divisions for eight weeks—completely removed from their day-to-day responsibilities—with the mission to launch new businesses to disrupt their existing business and, in turn, themselves. Could this initiative challenge the senior leaders’ thinking and create new neural pathways, new habits, and new ways to innovate and work by giving them the time and focus to embrace the reality of their industry’s commoditization, and the uncertainty of how to respond to it?
As Anders Ericsson—expert on performance and author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise—suggests, this sort of deliberate practice with executives and business leaders, given the mission to radically reinvent their business, ways of working, and themselves, could make a tremendous difference in the organization’s outcomes. By taking on challenges outside their comfort zones and by experimenting with new methods, tools, and techniques, these leaders could break free of fixed behaviors and myopic mindsets, and catapult to higher levels of performance.
IAG realized that they couldn’t keep doing the same one-day innovation off-sites that delivered too little, or wait on multiyear transformational programs that arrived too late. They needed to create a sustainable system to drive innovation in their company, and stop doing the same old actions and expecting different results. So IAG designed a purpose-built petri dish to unlearn the way these leaders would do innovation, relearn by running six of their most senior people through an eight-week “Catapult,” and get the breakthroughs they desired as a result of working, experiencing, and seeing the world in a different way.
I had the opportunity to work with this team from IAG as we tackled the Catapult challenge. The team’s mission was to disrupt themselves and their existing business by working through lots of different ideas, and then testing them to figure out which ones would work and which ones wouldn’t. We would move people outside their comfort zones and remove them from their day-to-day contexts so they would have a safe environment to be more expansive, unlearn old ways of working, relearn new ways of working, and develop the breakthrough thinking and behavior that would fuel individual growth and systemic impact.
They would learn by doing—with time, focus, and permission to be bold. Failure was to do what had been done before, and to not achieve the outcome we set: to discover six ideas that had the potential to change the course of their industry, and in turn transform IAG and themselves.
Early in the eight-week Catapult immersion, one of the participating IAG team members came up with an idea they believed would revolutionize the experience for how people would book travel. The airline industry is uniquely complex when it comes to reserving and buying tickets because there are so many different ways to do so. You can book it directly with the airline, with a travel agent, with a flight aggregator, or even at the airport on your travel day. The way you book a flight determines how much the airline actually knows about you and what kind of service it can provide.
If you are a loyal, premium flyer, airlines want to reward your behavior by making you feel special—perhaps the gate agent upgrades you to first class. However, if you booked your ticket through a travel agent or intermediator, the airline may not have your membership information attached to your ticket. So when you walk up to the counter, the agent may not have the information on hand that highlights your premium status, and therefore may not give you the special treatment you are used to.
This is an unsatisfying experience for any airline’s customers, and one the airlines aspire to resolve. They want to make you feel special by providing a contextual offer or personalized experience based on who you are, the situation you’re in, and the data you believe they should know about you but can’t.
What’s ironic about this situation is, of all industries, airlines actually have the most information about their customers. They know your name, your address, how much you fly, where you fly from, and where you fly to. They know what you like to eat and drink, what you buy from their in-flight duty-free stores, and whether you prefer luxury or economy. They know if you use their affiliated hotels, rental car agencies, and other third-party offerings. They know if you’re a trusted traveler, or if you deserve extra scrutiny by airport security. In the airline industry, the company with the biggest, most expansive platform and network wins.
So when a team member in the Catapult took a look at this system with a view to improving it, he displayed all the signs of the typical classroom-taught, corporate-conditioned approach to innovation. He was an expert, so not only did he believe he had all the answers, he was convinced his great first idea was the best idea: a new booking platform. He was certain this idea was going to be loved by customers and transform the business—and the industry—if everyone just got on board with it. He defaulted to High-Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) mode, pushing his ideas on people instead of pulling ideas from the company’s customers.
What was truly needed was for this Catapult team member to unlearn all his classically conditioned thinking and behaviors around product innovation.
We encouraged him to sketch a simple prototype of this new booking platform and test it on some real, live customers. The feedback from the testing was not good. In fact, it was dreadful. Customers didn’t like it—at all.
He rejected this feedback, thinking that the polling must have been faulty and we were testing with the wrong customer base. “Customers who really understood airline pricing and ticket types would understand why it was such a great new product—get me the right customers for this idea,” he said. So we repeated the process. Again, we got the same result and the same response. He was convinced that the customers didn’t understand what we were offering them, and so we repeated the process again, and again. After about four cycles—with the same undesired result—I sat down with him to reflect.
“What do you think the issue is?” I asked.
“It’s the idea, not the customer,” he said.
This leader entered the Cycle of Unlearning without realizing it. Upon iteration, reflection, and retrospection, the breakthrough came. Our mindset and behavior is the problem, not our customers’. By embracing the Cycle of Unlearning his thinking flipped 180 degrees. He grasped the benefit of the new behavior and started to accelerate his unlearning of old thinking and behaviors.
This leader came to the realization that every “great” idea, every new innovation, is at best a guess—a belief and hypothesis—and we must design experiments to test the assumptions of our hypothesis, ideally with the customers we are designing for. Their feedback is the most authoritative and objective guide through the uncertainty inherent in innovation. When we start to see the world this way, everything becomes an opportunity to unlearn, relearn, and break through. This IAG leader ended up becoming one of the standout members of the team, because he started to embrace the Cycle of Unlearning in every aspect of his work. He shifted his behavior to unlearn and relearn everything he thought he knew. He became curious again and was able to escape the “I (must) know all the answers” trap by turning obstacles to unlearning into opportunities for impact.
He had moved from a know it all to an unlearn it all.
IAG realized that the Catapult was just the start—the first small step. By setting an aspiration to discover six ideas to change the course of their industry and transform the company and its leadership, IAG identified numerous industry innovations. They started their own venture fund, the Hanger 51 accelerator program—a collaboration with industry start-ups and disruptors—to further challenge their thinking and behaviors, leveraging and innovating their existing assets. They adopted blockchain technology to build the first digital identity service to help airlines share data safely and securely when passengers take connecting flights. They created simple ways for customers to record and share trips, making sure that the customers never forget their experiences and adventures. And they leveraged predictive analytics to analyze unstructured customer feedback by focusing on automatically categorizing the data and visualizing key insights in just minutes (what had normally taken months of manual data analysis), thereby improving their services in context for customers.4
Most recently, IAG demonstrated that while they started small, they are still thinking BIG. In March 2017, IAG launched an entirely new transatlantic airline, LEVEL, in response to increased competition in the low-cost, long-haul market. LEVEL sold 52,000 seats within two days of being established, and more than 147,000 seats after little more than a month and a half, far exceeding IAG’s expectations.5
While all these innovations were outstanding breakthroughs for IAG in their industry, the biggest impact has been much more lasting, profound, and systemic—the change in leadership mindset. Leaders throughout the organization, inspired by the Catapult experience, went back to the company with newly found confidence and capability to get uncomfortable and unlearn, while helping others to unlearn, relearn, and break through.
Stephen Scott, chief digital officer for IAG’s Avios Group Limited, shared a key reflection from the experience: “Part of unlearning is not getting stuck doing only what worked in the past. When 97 percent of people think you should just go back to doing what you’ve been doing, or resist the change you are trying to make, you know you’re on to something, and that’s where the breakthrough journey begins . . .” The company and its leadership now see uncertainty as an opportunity to get outside their comfort zone, challenge themselves, and win.
When We Should Apply the Cycle of Unlearning
Now that we have a better understanding of how the Cycle of Unlearning works, this begs the question: When should we unlearn? You might not be surprised to discover that my answer to that question is, “Always,” but let’s first consider some of the kinds of signals that should tell you it’s time to take an immediate loop through the Cycle of Unlearning.
One compelling situation is when you have tried everything to resolve a challenge, but you haven’t achieved the aspiration or outcome you desire, you haven’t lived up to your expectations, or you’re simply stuck. Just as IAG leadership realized innovation off-sites or classroom certifications weren’t going to provide a lasting impact on their executives’ long-term behaviors or mindsets, you too must be courageous enough to recognize what you’re doing isn’t working, and commit to taking an alternative, potentially radical, approach.
Another situation is when new information triggers new understanding of the world, such as the insights Patrick Mouratoglou first shared with Serena Williams. With technology advancing at near-exponential rates and business markets changing almost as quickly, we are constantly bombarded with new information. If we take time to absorb this information—an idea sparked by a chance conversation, insight gained by dealing with a customer, or a game-changing new technology—we can turn to the Cycle of Unlearning to help us embrace new approaches that will bring us success in the future.
While these situations are pivotal moments to unlearn, the ideal state is not to be in a situation triggered by existential threats or crises, and—as I suggested at the beginning of this book—to instead adopt the practice of unlearning regularly, habitually, as we do breathing and living itself.
With ongoing, deliberate practice, each one of us has the ability to leverage unlearning instinctively and use it intentionally, not only as a response when there is no option. We can then develop a capability to solve any challenge we face or aspiration we wish to achieve simply by unlearning what is holding us back, relearning new behaviors to address it, and breaking through to leap ahead. This unique capability is what enables leaders to continually find new and higher levels of performance, often beyond what they thought they, their teams, and their businesses were initially capable of.
The single most important action of any leader is to model the behaviors you wish to see others exhibit in the organization. By cultivating the practice of unlearning your own mindset and behaviors you will begin to make unlearning a part of your organization’s culture—encouraging others to unlearn and feel safe to do so. The way you behave reflects the values and expectations you have of yourself and of others.
But, in some ways, our minds conspire against us. We are physically and psychologically hardwired to respond to our environments—and to the information we receive from a variety of sources—in certain premeditated and programmed ways. Understanding how this affects our decision making, and how we must adapt to address it, is critically important to being able to succeed in adopting the Cycle of Unlearning.