Someone or something always gives up. It is either you give up and quit or the obstacle or failure gives up and makes way for your success to come through.
—Idowu Koyenikan
The third and final step of the Cycle of Unlearning is breakthrough. 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. The new information and insights are extremely powerful because they inform and transform your perspective. You experience the benefits of a new perspective, which impacts your mindset, and you become more open to unlearning your behaviors more often. It’s an accelerant.
People find it extremely hard to let go of their amazing ideas. In fact, we are so conditioned to our way of thinking, seeing, and behaving that any new, contradictory, or alternative information that challenges our basic assumptions of what steps it takes to achieve success will be ignored, discounted, and blocked.
As we experience breakthroughs and free ourselves 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. Holding on to the same thinking and behaviors inhibits our ongoing and future success. Our breakthroughs provide the opportunity to reflect on the lessons we have learned from relearning and provide the springboard for tackling bigger and more audacious challenges ahead of us.
This process can be as simple as asking ourselves what went well, not so well, and what would we do differently if we 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, and greater impact and growth.
Professional athletes have long known the power of using feedback and reflection to improve their performance and achieve breakthroughs. Traditionally, this insight has come from coaches—just like the ones Patrick Mouratoglou first delivered to Serena at his academy in Paris—but increasingly, technology is providing a very real edge. The NFL has begun embedding radio frequency identity (RFID) sensors in players’ shoulder pads to allow teams to gather precise data on their workload and efficiency during practice and games. This near real-time feedback can then be used to help players reflect on their results and gain new insight to perform at an even higher level in current and future matches.1
After breakthrough, the cycle starts all over again as leaders deliberately practice unlearning, building muscle memory to push forward with new initiatives, new innovations, new ideas, and new systems of operating. The initial breakthrough leads to the second breakthrough and the realization that you can have endless breakthroughs. What’s even better is you recognize that at any point in time, when you need to have a breakthrough, you can apply the Cycle of Unlearning to achieve surprising and potentially radical breakthroughs.
In her book Mindset, Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck outlines the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. She demonstrates the reason why some people believe they cannot learn new information and get smarter, while others believe they can.
According to Dweck, people who have a fixed mindset believe that qualities such as talent and intelligence are fixed and cannot be developed and improved over time. In essence, people with a fixed mindset believe you are born with a set level of talents, skills, and abilities—and no intervention or practice can alter those levels. They believe that intelligence or talent (or a combination of both) is what leads to success, not effort, and so they struggle with the idea that they have the ability to achieve breakthroughs and higher levels of performance in any domain.
On the other hand, people who have a growth mindset believe that qualities such as talent and intelligence are not fixed—they can be cultivated through effort, and developed and improved over time. These people further believe that success can be attained through dedication and deliberate practice, and they are resilient in the face of challenges. According to Dweck, “Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports. It enhances relationships.”2 And a growth mindset makes breakthroughs an achievable aspiration for those who possess it.
Mindset also affects how managers treat their employees. Those who manage with a fixed mindset end up with employees who exhibit learned helplessness and never take ownership and risk anything or embrace uncertainty. On the other hand, those managers who lead with a growth mindset develop teams that will take a chance, sensing there is a high level of psychological safety in their team accompanied by the explicit support of their leadership. This encourages employees to seek higher levels of performance through accountability, risk-taking, and experimentation to improve. They are conditioned to take on challenges, strive for excellence, and consistently see potential to develop new skills—and unlearn.
In this chapter, I explore how to enter into and optimize this third step of the Cycle of Unlearning, and how leaders—and organizations—can use it to accelerate further breakthroughs for extraordinary results.
There’s a famous story about an executive who hired Edward W. Deming to spend a week with his team and offer recommendations on how to improve both their own performance and the performance of the organization they led. Word has it that Deming arrived on the first day, said “hello,” and then walked straight to the corner of the executive’s office to sit down. He stayed there, sitting silently for the entire day as the executive went about his daily activities.
At the end of the day, the executive approached Deming and asked, “Do you have any thoughts?” All Deming said was, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” and he walked out the door.
The next day—just as he had the day before—Deming walked into the executive’s office, sat in the corner, and said nothing. He scribbled a few notes from time to time as the executive went about his daily activities. Again, at the end of the day, the executive asked Deming for his thoughts. Again, Deming simply said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
This cycle continued throughout the entire week until Friday evening, when the executive lost patience and pushed Deming for a more informative answer. Deming asked him one question: “What are the top three priorities for the business?” The executive rolled them off like a shot. “Well,” said Deming, “you’ve spent the entire week working on none of them, yet your time has been entirely booked, and every conversation with you and every conversation with every individual that walks into your office starts with how busy you are. Can you guess why?”
We all love being busy. In fact, we celebrate and subtly enjoy telling our colleagues, collaborators, and competitors how busy we are. The question we don’t consider is this: What is the result of all this busy-ness?
In the majority of organizations, being busy is systemic, and often for perverse reasons. Being visibly busy is often seen as or at least equal to hard work, real work, important work. Yes, being visibly and easily observed as busy by constantly running around from meeting to meeting, short on time with places to go and people to see, signifies credibility of hard, committed work. In many cases, people are rewarded for it—further propagating the hero culture of the outstanding employee working late nights, evenings, and weekends to get us over the line. It becomes the drug to keep the hamsters’ wheels spinning, and all this motion is mistaken for progress.
It’s not.
As we have seen, each of the three steps in the Cycle of Unlearning can be broken down into a series of specific necessary conditions for action. In the case of breakthrough, there are four necessary conditions: reflect, feed forward, scale breakthroughs, and increase your rate of unlearning. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You may recall from Chapter 2 my story about the IAG Catapult team member who rejected the extremely negative feedback from customers about his idea for a new booking platform he thought had the potential to save the business. (“Customers who really understood would understand—get me the right customers for this idea,” he said—quite seriously.) Although the transformation in this leader’s perspective didn’t happen overnight, he did go on to become the exemplar exponent of the Cycle of Unlearning. He embraced it fully and never looked back.
How did he do this? Through reflection.
By consciously reflecting on what had happened, his breakthrough was the realization that the actual issue was his behavior: He was telling the customer what they wanted, not asking them what they needed and then designing and building a product to provide that.
For many leaders, the initial breakthrough happens after someone goes through the Cycle of Unlearning once or twice. However, the radical breakthrough leaders discover is when they realize the Cycle of Unlearning is a system that can be applied everywhere: “Well, maybe everything I think I know is an assumption, and I should test that. What I should really be trying to do is find the fastest ways to test all the things I do. And what’s even better is not just testing it with myself—I should test it with the people I’m designing for.”
I have a favorite story related to this leader. A few weeks after the Catapult, he sent me an email to report on what happened when one of his employees came in to get him to sign off on a new product that they had built. His response to the employee was evidence of the breakthroughs this leader had experienced: “Why are you asking me to sign it off? You should get out of the office, go to the airport to find our customers, and test it with them. If we design and build it for them, get them to sign it off not me.”
One of my clients is a large, global financial institution that was in the middle of a business transformation to develop greater agility across their organization. The firm has numerous initiatives in various stages of completion. But the predominant mindset and behavior of the leadership team at the outset was very much, “We have these big initiatives to do, and we have a big plan to accomplish them. Let’s just find out all the tasks that need to be executed and go execute them.”
Seems to make sense, right? Because success was defined by the leadership team as completing all their tasks, that’s what the emphasis was on—ensuring people, teams, and the company were always busy getting their lists of tasks done on time and within budget—and that’s how employees were rewarded.
But believe me, you don’t break through to transform yourself, your teams, or your organization by simply ticking boxes as you complete your task list. You break through by stepping back and reflecting on exactly what it is you are doing and the results your effort is yielding. Are you doing the right things? Should you be doing something different? Are you actually achieving the aspiration or outcomes you intended? Or are you simply ticking off tasks on a list, and asking if it took as much effort or time as you thought?
When I started working with this company, I knew the first priority was to help the leadership team recognize the limit of their existing leadership conditioning to be unlearned and introduce new behavior to relearn. I explained that it didn’t make sense to just measure outputs. What we really wanted to measure was outcomes. So, not the execution-based approach of, “Did we have an idea, break it down to a detailed list of its required tasks, complete the tasks, and then get them done on time, on budget, and within scope?” But instead reflect on whether they were actually achieving the outcomes we wanted from their work in the fastest, most effective way, such as “Did we increase customer retention by 10 percent in the last quarter?” When you frame your work in terms of outcomes instead of outputs, then you’ve set yourself up to scale your breakthroughs and options for achieving success.
I asked the client team to try a new, small behavior. Before performing work, they would first write a hypothesis for their work—a proposed if/then theory and outcome-based measures of success to use as a starting point—then conduct a series of experiments to test that hypothesis and see if they achieved the outcomes that they wanted. At the end of each week, we would sit down to reflect on what outcomes they actually achieved. This would be their transition from relearning to breakthrough.
The company’s CEO quickly discovered that it’s remarkably easy just to ask, “Did you do the tasks?” and then move on to the next one, and the next. It’s much harder to take the time to find out if the task you did actually impacted the outcomes that you were trying to achieve. During the course of one of our reflections, the CEO wrote on a card, “Agility is hard,” which he then stuck on the wall for the rest of the team to see. This was a very powerful—and personal—breakthrough for him. People were shocked to see this admission from the CEO. He went on to explain that he thought he was being agile in the way that both he and the team worked. But then he realized by doing it—relearning why outcomes matter more than outputs—that the way he was doing it, his beliefs and behaviors, actually were incorrect. He also realized how much easier it is to do good experimentation when you hold yourself accountable to outcomes instead of outputs by reflecting on results instead of effort.
While this was a tremendous breakthrough for the CEO, he then went further, feeding forward his insight to scale breakthroughs throughout the entire organization. Following our reflection, he sent an email message to the entire company, who were at the time going through this same transformation initiative. The title was “Agility is hard,” and he went on to explain how he was trying to work with the leadership team in a new way. They were themselves experimenting with the practices and principles of the methodologies that they were asking other people in the company to adopt. He thought they were being agile, but upon reflection he realized they weren’t. He thought it was easy, but he discovered it was actually quite difficult.
When the CEO came to this realization, shared his failure, and demonstrated vulnerability, humility, and a willingness to work with his leadership team in a new way, he created a ripple effect throughout the entire organization. Not only did he demonstrate a growth mindset and humanize himself as a leader to others, he became a role model for the unlearning that needed to happen in this particular business to build a new foundation for long-term success.
People get stuck just being busy in most organizations. They’re constantly being measured on how busy they are, and how many tasks they have completed—the harder you work, the better a contributor you are. Or so it’s thought. What would be much better is thinking about what you are really trying to achieve, and asking the question: What could be our smallest effort to deliver the greatest impact to get there? The problem with over-optimizing for executing work is that people get stuck in planning and doing activities—but fail to reflect on the results.
They never create feedback loops that allow them to measure the outcomes of their effort, over the output of their activity. They compromise reflection, retrospection, and review of the outcomes of all the output they are creating—the very thought of pausing for even just a moment or two makes people anxious about how it may impact their ability to produce even more output. They stop building feedback loops into their work. They fail to reflect on the results of all this effort or feed forward the information they have discovered to inform their decision making, make course corrections, and guide their next steps. They don’t allow time to study, consider, or understand if the result of all this activity is actually aligned to what they are hoping to achieve. They are frankly too busy to. This, of course, is a mistake to be unlearned.
As you gather feedback from your small experiments, feed the results forward into your next small experiment, and then feed those results forward into your next small experiment—the benefits become exponential. The quality of each subsequent experiment increases because you will tend to apply and compound the lessons learned from previous experiments.
Measure your outcomes over output. Strive to gather feedback in real time to discover rapidly how your efforts have been received, thus optimizing your adaptions and next actions in minutes, hours, and days rather than weeks, months, and years as might be the case with traditional approaches.
These are the steps to take an experimental, evidence-based approach to innovation and build feedback loops in everything:
• Declare a hypothesis for improvement that will address the challenge you’re facing or take you toward your desired direction (as you did in unlearn statements).
• Define outcome-based measures of success before starting experiments, and then hold yourself accountable for them.
• Use the information you discover to feed forward and inform your next steps.
• Understand that success is to gather information as quickly and cheaply as possible to inform better decision making and behavior.
• Recognize that the only true failure is the failure to learn, so learn fast.
• Feed forward the information you discover to the next Cycle of Unlearning to create a virtuous cycle that informs decision making, new behavior, new perspectives, new thinking, and what next to unlearn.
One key reason why people can’t break out of their old patterns of thinking and doing is because they get stuck in execution mode; they don’t take time to pause, think, or reflect. As a result, they don’t intentionally build upon effective behaviors and can’t scale their occasional successes into greater or more frequent and impactful ones.
So how do we start to scale the Cycle of Unlearning and the breakthroughs that result? The key is deliberate practice, which demands explicit focus, reflection, and taking on more challenging tasks to keep improving and progressing toward extraordinary results. We can begin to accomplish this by clarifying what it is we wish to unlearn, continuing to think big and take the next small step, reflecting on the outcomes we achieve, being willing to embrace greater uncertainty and unknowns, and, again, choosing courage over comfort. It takes discipline to commit to grow and improve. That is why the people who push ahead are the ones who are constantly trying to find their knowledge thresholds, their skills thresholds, and taking one step beyond that. This requires courage because you are not guaranteed predictable outcomes. Like Serena Williams after her shocking loss at the 2012 French Open, be persistent and promote relearning in safe-to-fail ways that provide growth opportunities to embrace uncertainty, accelerate ahead, and win.
We discussed the work of Brené Brown in Chapter 4, specifically her research into vulnerability and courage. Relearning takes great courage, and it requires those who engage in it to become vulnerable to the very real possibility that they may fail. According to Brown, vulnerability is showing courage rather than comfort when you have to take a step into the unknown to achieve an outcome that you want. That’s what true vulnerability is and that ties into Edgar Schein’s idea of learning anxiety: People are afraid to experiment with new behaviors because they don’t know how to do them and are uncertain of what results the new behaviors will achieve and how the results could impact how they’re perceived.
We talk a lot about the idea of psychological safety: how safe people feel to fail in front of others, especially members of their team. Google’s Aristotle project found it to be the number-one indicator for high-performance teams. People who feel safe to fail in front of one another go bigger and achieve better breakthroughs. It’s not how smart the members of the team are; it’s how comfortable they are testing, failing, and being vulnerable with the others looking on.
Google found that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams at the company apart from their less successful counterparts:
• Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
• Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?
• Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
• Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
• Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
Helping people tie their effort to the outcomes they are seeking to achieve is invaluable. When people can see alignment and connection between their effort and the outcomes they are aiming to affect—instead of simply monitoring their output—it has a profound effect on their ability to recognize how their new behaviors are working, feel successful in attempting new behaviors, realize their breakthroughs, and have confidence to continue to tackle greater challenges to achieve extraordinary results.
This is why it’s important for leaders to match and measure people with work that matters—tapping into and leveraging existing aspirations or desired outcomes that are personally important to them and the company—so they can connect their work to the outcome they effect. The desired outcomes must be clearly defined and new behaviors encouraged and safely nurtured. By aligning effort to outcomes, people can feel successful when they engage in the desired behavior that impacts the outcomes they wish to effect. This serves to further accelerate their breakthroughs via the feedback, alignment, and connection it provides (as we’ll see with Capital One in Chapter 10).
If we constantly stay in our comfort zone, we’ll stagnate and not grow. By going through the Cycle of Unlearning, we are able to use the results, experiences, and information we discover to make better decisions, and these successful outcomes encourage us to take on the next bigger challenge.
It’s important to note that scaling breakthroughs is not about copying the same practices that one individual or organization did to achieve their breakthrough—remember behavior matching? You scale breakthroughs when you encourage people to share lessons from what they’ve done to improve, the successes that they’ve had, and the setbacks they’ve endured. That normalizes the behavior of getting uncomfortable, being courageous, and embracing uncertainty about how you will try to grow and improve in your own context.
Edgar Schein defined two kinds of anxiety associated with getting outside our comfort zone: survival anxiety and learning anxiety.3 He highlighted that anxiety inhibits learning, but anxiety is also necessary if learning is going to happen at all. For example, to trigger change people will often say, “If you don’t innovate, your business is going to be disrupted and die, or you’re going to get into trouble.” That’s meant to trigger your survival anxiety into action. In reality, that motivation only works for a period of time—people will eventually dismiss the trigger because while everyone’s telling them their business is going to die, they look around and their business still exists. It’s not a lasting motivator. It’s effective to a certain point but then becomes limited.
The other lever you have is reducing learning anxiety. Learning anxiety comes from being afraid to try something new for fear that it will be too difficult, that we will look stupid in the attempt, or that we will have to part with old habits that have worked for us in the past. Learning something new can cast us as a deviant in the groups we belong to and threaten our self-esteem—in extreme cases, even our identity.4
This is why making it safe and really easy to try new behaviors is a tap that has an endless supply of fuel to empower people to constantly experiment, grow, and have impact. This concept ties into BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design, Dweck’s idea of a growth mindset, and the results of the Google Aristotle project. All of these models highlight the same values and reinforce one another. Your role as a leader is to design systems of work that allow these behaviors to bloom.
Another mistake in business and talent transformation is the rollout of massive frameworks—a fixed set of behaviors and routines—in companies and expecting them to work in every context of the organization. They fail because every organization is different, every context is different, every person is different—again, remember behavior matching! Just applying a similar set of behaviors in every situation is not going to make you successful, but it will make you look busy.
Let’s return to the CEO of the large financial company. As he started to work in a different way, and as he experimented with the way he ran his leadership team, he realized that they didn’t actually take a lot of time to reflect on the outcomes of the work that they were doing. By sharing his story—the new insight, new information, and lessons learned, he started to adapt his behavior. By writing an email to the entire company he increased the level of psychological safety for others to be courageous, reducing learning anxiety, and championing a growth mindset among employees. And by intentionally reflecting every week as the leadership team tried to relearn new behaviors, they experienced breakthroughs. They realized they were focused on just doing tasks and not thinking about whether they were actually solving problems or achieving the outcomes that they wanted as a result of doing the tasks.
The last piece of the puzzle that leads to greater breakthroughs and extraordinary results is to increase your rate of unlearning. Pairing experimentation with deliberate practice enables you to respond to a rapidly changing world. Thomas Edison understood the power of unlearning, relearning, and breakthroughs at his Menlo Park complex, which was known at the time as the “Invention Factory.”5 Edison and his team optimized for the number of experiments they ran, rather than how long they worked. In many ways, Edison’s operation looked a lot like today’s Silicon Valley tech firms. There was no such thing as a 9-to-5 schedule—workers labored through the night if necessary and slept the next day. Everything was in beta and subject to constant experimentation until they achieved the outcomes they desired and the breakthroughs they sought. Consequently, new products were born.
Da Vinci didn’t have a to-do list; he had a to-discover list. Instead of a list of what to buy at the market—fruit, vegetables, some meat, he would write down questions to answer aspirations and outcomes to achieve. This led him to explore uncertainty and the unknown, and fueled a constant curiosity. Da Vinci’s approach to problem solving by asking questions was revolutionary in his time, and it foreshadowed the development of the scientific method more than a century later by Sir Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of Da Vinci’s lists:
• [Calculate] the measurement of Milan and suburbs.
• Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
• Get Messer Fazio to show you about proportion.
• Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal, and mill in the Lombard manner.
• [Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese.6
Great leaders get better answers because they ask better questions. And they ask them in ways that increases the rate at which they unlearn, relearn, and break through—both for themselves and for others with whom they work and do business. The more times you go through the Cycle of Unlearning, the more experiments you do, the more information and insights you gather, the more effectively you adapt your behaviors and mindset. This will compound and increase the likelihood you will achieve exponential impact and growth because you’re cycling through the odds and discovering what works and what does not. Each subsequent experiment increases your lessons learned, which you’ll then feed forward into the next experiments, leading to an exponential payoff.
People like Edison and Da Vinci recognized this, and they optimized themselves and their work to go through cycles of unlearning and relearning and breakthroughs as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Today, companies have recognized this advantage. The reason the biggest, most successful companies in the world are all technology companies is because they’ve built platforms that allow them to discover exactly how their customers interact with them and to more deeply understand their customers’ behaviors. They’re constantly going through cycles of unlearning what they believe to be true for what’s actually true, at a massive scale, and taking a data-informed approach to design their products and services.
Today’s most innovative and successful companies run thousands of experiments each year. Amazon chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. We’ve tried to reduce the cost of doing experiments so that we can do more of them.”7 And there’s no end in sight. According to Greg Greeley, the global VP in charge of Amazon’s Prime service, “I would like to say the team thinks, ‘Oh, boy, we’ll take a deep breath here.’ But the way this company [is], it wouldn’t surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating.”8
In 2011, Amazon had the ability to deploy software every 11.6 seconds, which means the company could discover something new every 11.6 seconds.9 I’m certain that, years later, this capability has only accelerated. And the company doesn’t just experiment and unlearn from its website, which started small by selling books. It’s across the entirety of Amazon’s real estate, including the Echo voice-activated personal assistant, the Kindle e-book reader, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the marketplace, and much more. All these platforms support and feed into one another, creating mountains of remarkably valuable data on customer preferences, behaviors, and habits. Their decisions are then informed by all this data, creating powerful virtuous learning loops.
Unlearning is a deliberate, controlled practice. It’s constantly pushing everyone in the organization to be courageous and embrace uncertainty and the unknown, rather than just staying with what’s comfortable and predictable. And it’s always encouraging your people and your teams to discover the breakthroughs that enable them to let go of past success and achieve extraordinary results.