Unlearning: The Key to the Growth Mindset

Unlearning: The Key to the Growth Mindset

As a child, I (along with everyone else in my family) played soccer. In the early days most children do what’s called toe-poking. You kick the ball with the tip of your toe. A toe-poke usually gets you more power than you’d otherwise get, but at the cost of both injuring your foot and not being able to aim the ball at all. When my father was trying to teach me not to toe-poke, he kept showing me the proper way to kick, but that way was worse. The ball wouldn’t go as far, it was hard to do, and I was temporarily a worse player for it. However, eventually I was forced to overcome toe-poking, much to my betterment. I had to unlearn how to kick the ball so that I could learn how to properly do it. 

(the shoes I would have wanted as a child)

Tiger Woods did much the same (he and I have also collectively won 15 majors!). In 1997 he won the Masters by twelve strokes in a pretty dominating performance (I was similarly dominant in U-7 soccer). He then worked with his coach to completely remake his swing. His next two years of performance were pretty bad, as he was actively unlearning his old swing so that he could learn a new swing. However, he emerged out of that cocoon and won all four majors in a row in 2000. He then underwent the same process a second time a few years later in order to rework his swing again. 

I want to start by defining unlearning, as it’s a term you’ve maybe never run into before. Unlearning isn’t forgetting. I still know how to toe-poke, Tiger never forgot what his old swing was like. Instead, unlearning is a conscious choice to abandon the familiar, to break the habit, to move away from the successful (or unsuccessful) pattern that you’ve developed. Choosing to unlearn something often involves taking a short term loss for a long term gain. Tiger struggled for two years of competition. I was probably not as dominant as an approximately 8 year old soccer star. If unlearning was simply forgetting, it would both be easy and harmful. We don’t want to forget! It’s good to remember the old way of doing things, that helps you frame the new thing that you’re learning. But you cannot make space for the new without actively choosing to get rid of the old.

The Unlearning Crisis in Business

In the Adaptation Economy (which I’ve explained in other blog posts), deep expertise can become a bit of a liability. As the world changes around us, the experts need to regularly update their mental models. However, the practice of becoming an expert is usually antithetical to regularly changing your view of the thing about which you are an expert. When contexts change, experts have more to unlearn than individuals who might be fresh to that area. The novice just learns the new way of doing things or thinking, the expert must first unlearn their old way before they can learn the new way. This is much harder than it sounds and is a skill that is regularly pushed against in many businesses. Your experts are in charge because of their expertise. Telling them to unlearn the thing about which they are an expert in order to learn the new thing that is starting to take over their subject area is a tall order. 

Attachment to old methods oftentimes prevents the adoption of new, superior ones. The classic Innovator’s Dilemma is that the thing that brought you success will eventually become a cage that you’re operating in and thus limit your future success. You build a product that customers love and you get a ton of users, only to be beholden to those users and build features for them. Over time you turn into the legacy company that the new upstart is looking to supplant. This process directly relates to the need to unlearn. Old methods worked, they brought you success. However, the context in which those methods succeeded has changed. As much as the expert wants to argue that their expertise is still relevant, it is oftentimes not. What is relevant is their ability to adapt. The best experts are ready to unlearn their old methods so that they can learn the new ones. The old knowledge that they had helps them learn the new methods faster and understand them more deeply; unlearning is not forgetting! However, if they fail to unlearn, if they simply try to tack on the new knowledge to their old process, your company is hamstrung, forced to operate under a mindset that no longer delivers value.

The Neuroscience of Letting Go

Our brains are designed to work on auto-pilot as much as possible. Every time we do something, we strengthen a neural pathway in our brain (literally the synapse that connects the neuron becomes stronger). As those pathways get strengthened, our brain prefers to use them, they become nice little neural highways. It's for this reason that any action, accent, or process that you've used repeatedly eventually becomes second nature.

But here's the part most people don't know: your brain also has a reverse process called Long-Term Depression (something entirely unrelated to depression in the everyday sense). LTD serves to selectively weaken specific synapses, essentially breaking down neural pathways that are no longer useful. LTD can erase the increases caused by strengthening, and vice versa. This is the biological foundation of unlearning; your brain is actively weakening connections, not just failing to use them.

By building these neural pathways our brain is able to cognitively offload stuff. When I watch chefs cut any food with a knife I always think "how are they not slicing their fingers off?" They do it so quickly. But that's because they've done it so many times that they don't need to think about it anymore. I would need to think. My brain doesn't have those developed neural pathways. So while my brain has to devote attention to keeping ten fingers, their brain is able to think about the next dish they'll cook, daydream, have an imaginary argument with their coworkers, whatever. By not devoting cognitive space to a process, we free our brain to devote cognitive space to other things, and that's a good thing.

However, because of this, it's very easy to get set in our ways. Change starts to feel threatening as it disrupts the well established neural pathways that we've built. We have to start dedicating cognitive space to a new thing, and that makes us inefficient and slow. But here's where the science gets interesting: whether your brain strengthens or weakens pathways depends on the specific conditions during practice. Active disruption of old patterns triggers the weakening process whereas passive repetition just strengthens what's already there.

This is why simply trying to add new knowledge on top of old methods doesn't work. First, you need to actively engage your brain's pathway-weakening mechanisms. So I want to break down exactly what unlearning looks like. I’m even going to make a tiny list, much to my own chagrin, because our marketing team tells me that I need more lists to please the SEO gods. 

1. Recognition - you need to first identify what needs to be unlearned. This is more important than it sounds, and more difficult. This isn’t simply a matter of, “I need to unlearn X because it’s the old way.” Well, what aspects of X are carried over into Y, the new thing? Is Y structurally different from X? Did Y grow out of X or in contraposition to it? All of these sorts of factors can help you determine what exactly you need to unlearn.

2. Disruption - You need to actively break those old behaviors, patterns, methods, etc. Before you can build anew, you need to destroy. Everyone is different and so this process will be different for all of you and depends on what you’re trying to break. Leave yourself reminders, sticky notes, remove the old tools from your desktops, delete your accounts, whatever. You need to make it harder to do the old way than it will be to learn the new way. 

3. Replacement - We’re not destroying solely for the sake of destroying, we’re trying to rebuild. Having removed the old behavior we now have space for the new one. This is usually the fun part! Learning is fun! Do new cool stuff!

4. Reinforcement - You want to build strong neural pathways again. You don’t want to always have to devote cognitive space to the new thing that you’re working on. So you need to practice the new way, you need to make a habit of it. Certainly, this sets you up to need to unlearn it in the future, but it’s the only way that you can meaningfully incorporate that new thing into your process.

Building Your Unlearning Advantage

I want to sketch out a few strategies that you can employ to help in the above process, some individual and some corporate. I’m going to do it in list form. Our marketing team told me I should write some listicle articles and I refuse, so this is the closest we’ll get to that. First, some individual strategies and then some organizational strats. 

1. Unlearning Audit - Perform an audit of your methods and processes. How much of what you do is done because it’s the way you’ve always done it? What worked yesterday might not work for tomorrow. Understanding why you do things the way that you do is key to understanding which processes might need to be unlearned. 

2. Assumption Challenging - This is just a new habit to build. Regularly question your assumptions about doing things the right way. Be intellectually humble when you see others doing things differently. Get in the process of regularly asking yourself why you do things in a certain way and look for ways that others do that thing.

3. Beginner’s Mind - Every so often, approach a task as if you’re doing it for the first time. How would you do that thing if you’d never done it before? What mistakes would you make? How would you solve the problem? It’s hard to get out of our heads so maybe try to do this with something that’s completely foreign to you but that has the same structure to the thing that you do (for example, a problem in supply chain management might be structurally similar to a Euro-style board game, so if you are in supply chain and you can’t get out of your own head, how would you win at a board game that has many of the same constraints? What strategies would you use? By doing this, you’re approaching the same kind of problem in a new way, and thus helping yourself see if you’re beholden to a certain habit that you’ve built).

For some organizational suggestions:

1. Sunset Protocols - It’s worthwhile to develop formal processes for retiring outdated approaches. When you want to push the org in a new direction, telling everyone to learn XYZ doesn’t necessarily help. You need to have pathways in place for how the org unlearns its current way of doing things. This is an important part of change management.

2. Leadership Modeling - If you’re in a leadership role, it’s worth publicly engaging in unlearning for your company, and sharing your struggle in doing so. Are you finding the new AI world challenging? Talk about it. Share with your teams how you’re having to fight your instincts and what strategies you’re using to help yourself unlearn your old ways. By modeling this, you’re inviting everyone else to take part in the same process of unlearning. 

The Unlearning Imperative

Your biggest competitive disadvantage isn’t what you don’t know, it’s what you can’t let go of. The old ways worked, and so you want to stick with the old ways. They’ll keep working for a time longer, but at some point they will start to sink you. The future belongs to those who can abandon successful methods when better ones emerge or when they see the opportunity to define and create better ones. 

In the Adaptation Economy, you can perfect one approach and hope the world never changes, or you can be like Tiger (and me, who overcame toe-poking and had a middling career of youth soccer) and be in a constant state of evolution, always willing to start over if it means reaching the next level.