You’re in the midst of an enterprise transformation.
You have a vision for your future organization. And you know that the journey will require introducing new ideas and ways of working.
But what if to move forward, we need to first get rid of what’s no longer serving us? What if we need to Marie Kondo our brains?
Barry O’Reilly, one of the co-authors of “Lean Enterprise” shares his insights on this concept in his new book “Unlearn”.
In his words,
“I define unlearning as the process of letting go of, moving away from, and reframing once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit our success.”
– Barry O’Reilly
While he walks us through how individuals can unlearn, this book also offers messages for leaders. Here are my reactions to the concepts in the book and some examples of ways to apply them in organizations going through complex transformations.
Why we need to unlearn
The concept behind unlearning is that sometimes you can’t have breakthrough insights without deliberately changing your behavior and letting go of existing mindsets.
“Knowledge grows, and simultaneously it becomes obsolete as reality changes. Understanding involves both learning new knowledge and discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge.”
– Bo Hedberg
We are constantly taking in and interpreting information from our environment through our experiences. Building mental models of how the world works, that help us decide which actions are effective for reaching our goals.
We accumulate knowledge and draw conclusions. Without pausing to take a step back and evaluate if we should remove something.
However, if all of our understanding is built upon years of acquired principles, practices, assumptions, and bad habits, our models may no longer be the best fit for the current reality and problems.
To break out of this loop, we need to let go of our desire to always be correct, lean into an unlearning cycle, and encourage others to do the same.
In the book, O’Reilly guides us through a three-step process of 1) unlearning 2) relearning and 3) breakthrough.
Unlearn
Unlearning requires recognizing that what you’re doing isn’t working. It means being open to letting go of knowledge or actions, in order to approach a problem or challenge with a fresh perspective. It requires humility and shifting back to a beginner mindset.
“Smart people don’t learn… because they have too much invested in proving what they know and avoiding being seen as not knowing.”
– Chris Argyis, Harvard Business School professor
The first step of unlearning is to identify a challenge to address. Then, define success as what the future will look like when you’ve vanquished the challenge. And finally, commit to striving for courage over comfort to start relearning from a clean slate.
Example application
What’s a problem that you’ve been trying to solve but haven’t gained traction on? How will you know that you’ve succeeded?
One challenge I’ve seen lately is a team struggling to make progress on their backlog of change projects, and a team lead wondering why. An unlearning framing might be to unlearn the role of a team lead on this team within two weeks. And the experiment will have worked if by the end of the two weeks, the team spends 80% of their time working on changes that lead to outcomes, and 20% on figuring out what to prioritize, instead of the other way around.
Relearn
Relearning means taking in new information that can change your mental model. It requires being open to input that could challenge your past beliefs. And involves shifting your behaviors to better align with your goals, while conducting small experiments to test your assumptions and learn more.
While the problem you want to solve might be large, start with small behavior shifts and celebrate along the way (regardless of the results) to train your brain to love the process.
O’Reilly shares a couple of frameworks, like Fogg’s Behavior Model, that I found to be helpful. Basically, Fogg says that for a behavior to happen, you need motivation, ability, and a prompt.
You can increase motivation, but it’s not the easiest option. You can also improve ability to achieve the behavior by improving training or tools, or just making the behavior easier to do. Finally, you can also help change behavior by providing prompts to take action.
If you want to stop a behavior you can lower motivation or ability, or redirect a prompt to a new behavior.
Example application
What small behavior change could you make to better align with your goal?
Shifting how the team operates to gain more traction means taking a step back and looking at what behaviors you would want instead. Maybe the lead is jumping in and offering direction, causing the team to feel a lack of ownership. An alternative behavior could be to instead ask the team how they’d like to proceed. The lead could try out that new behavior for a week and see what the effects are.
Breakthrough
Breakthrough happens when you start behaving differently, which can lead to new mental models and insights. But it’s not just about behaving differently, you need to also reflect on what you’re learning and what it means for future challenges.
That means we need to be tracking and evaluating the results we’re creating, not just the number of tasks completed in a project.
Example application
What were the results of changing the behavior?
After practicing the behavior for a while, the lead would evaluate the results and formulate a hypothesis of the next behavior to change to move closer to resolving the challenge.
Scaling unlearning
To scale unlearning beyond ourselves and achieve more breakthroughs, we need to focus on designing systems of work where other people can test out the impact of behavior changes.
That means helping team members both understand your mission and develop the skills required to achieve it. Beyond that, games, simulations, sandboxes, and safe-to-fail experiments give your team the space to go through their own unlearning cycles. If you’re nervous about being hands-off, feedback loops and coaching are ways for leaders to redirect the team if it starts to go too far off track.
Environments that involve more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity require faster learning cycles. To reach our most ambitious transformation goals, it’s time to start unlearning.
“We are doomed to failure without a daily destruction of our various preconceptions.”
– Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System
How will you apply insights from this book in your own work? What do you want to unlearn?