The Courage to Forget - Unlearning in a World of Rapid Change

Unlearning involves reassessing entrenched beliefs and behaviors to adapt to change. It requires courage and humility, as it challenges our identity and assumptions. As demonstrated by teams in fintech and biotech, unlearning can enhance adaptability and innovation. By questioning fundamental beliefs, we can better integrate new knowledge and improve decision-making. #unlearning, #adaptability, #innovation, #fintech, #biotech, #courage, #decisionmaking

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Colig Experience Podcast. In this episode, we're diving into bold insights,

(00:09):
experimentation and groundbreaking leadership strategies. Today, we're exploring the power
of unlearning. How challenging, deeply ingrained beliefs can unlock new potential and transform
both personal and professional landscapes. Get ready to rethink what's possible. Let's
dive in. The concept of unlearning has become quite popular in recent years. Today, we can find

(00:35):
plenty of material, dealing with unlearning around habit change and mental agility. There's also
fertile research on this topic in brain science that presents the neurological processes that
occur when we try to change existing patterns. If this interests you, look for material on
synaptic pruning. When we talk about unlearning, we mean everything that affects our actions,

(00:59):
our opinions and our decisions. Unlearning requires a generous measure of courage. The reason for this
is that our tendency is to identify with our perceptions, opinions and actions, to identify
in the sense that they become part of our identity. If we see our beliefs or actions as part of our

(01:21):
identity components, then giving them up would be giving up on who we are, and that's not something
that comes easily to us. For people who are able to make this separation between perceptions and
actions and who they really are, it will be much easier to unlearn, since the cost of giving up
will be much more reasonable and bearable for them. Another reason for our difficulty in parting

(01:46):
with our attachments is paradoxical. The world is changing rapidly. This change requires us to
adapt ourselves and naturally to be trained in unlearning, but the pace of change works on us in
exactly the opposite direction. The lack of stability arouses anxiety about change, and our

(02:08):
response to it is to retreat into the familiar and routine. By the way, our narrow perspective
makes it somewhat difficult for us to be aware of unlearning processes, but if we broaden our view
to societies, we can easily see how over time there's a constant process where accepted and
entrenched perceptions are abandoned in favour of alternatives that grow in their place. Walter

(02:33):
Williams, a Welsh cultural researcher who lived in the 20th century, argued that the role of culture
is to be the catalyst for society's unlearning processes and therefore its central role in
human development. It's interesting to think about the parallel of culture in the personal
context. Within the framework of this discussion, we'll refer to three meanings of the cancellation

(02:57):
action. The UN of unlearning, an internal attitude of humility and curiosity challenging
fundamental beliefs and treating knowledge as a filter. We're surrounded by people from whom we
can learn a great deal. We can learn from them in the sense of knowledge that will pass from
their heads to ours, and we can observe them and see how they do things and try to imitate them.

(03:21):
Imitation is considered an action that's not very valued, the opposite of originality. This is an
assumption that deserves unlearning because we actually can't really develop without imitating
others. In order to learn from what surrounds us, we need to be in a position of curiosity and
humility. Curiosity means truly wanting to listen and understand what the other side has to say,

(03:47):
to release the automatic judgment we have when we listen to others' opinions, not to reduce them
to frameworks we've already fixed on them in advance and to assume that maybe we have something
to learn from them. Curiosity is authentic interest in what people around us think and feel,
not because that's how we should behave, but because that's what matters to us,

(04:11):
because we really want to. This will happen if we don't put ourselves at the centre all the time.
If our ego shrinks itself a bit and gives room for more people to enter our space of interest,
this leads us to humility. To learn something new, we need to suspend our ego, set it aside,

(04:31):
and for one moment be beginners, those who don't know who need others to learn from them.
This is an interesting point because there's an inverse relationship between how much we declare
this position and how difficult it really is for us to be in it. We know how to say that we have no
problem learning from everyone and that we're not the smartest person in the room, but in reality

(04:57):
it's not really that easy for most of us to be in a position of dependence on others.
Let us share an example from our consulting work. We worked with a software development team at a
Fintech startup that had been incredibly successful using waterfall methodology for their core banking
platform. The team lead, who had 15 years of experience, genuinely believed that their structured,

(05:22):
documentation heavy approach was the only way to ensure reliability in financial software.
When the company wanted to adopt agile practices to speed up feature development,
he resisted strongly. Through our unlearning process, we helped him trace back his fundamental
belief that financial software requires exhaustive upfront planning because mistakes cost millions.

(05:47):
Once he recognized this underlying assumption and experimented with incremental delivery on
non-critical features, he discovered that shorter feedback loops actually improved quality. The team's
velocity increased by 40% within three months. Beneath every action we take, beneath every
decision we make, and beneath every position we take, lie basic fundamental assumptions through

(06:12):
which we see the world. These are our beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs are the
glasses through which we perceive reality. They're the filter through which new information comes
or doesn't come to us, and they're not many. If we investigate ourselves deeply enough,
we'll discover that at the base of our position, there's a very limited number of such

(06:35):
fundamental perceptions on which our perception of reality is based, and they're what dictate a
significant part of the decisions we make. Let's give an example. Say there's a manager who opposes
working from home. Why because he doesn't think it's effective? Why because he thinks employees
will engage in things unrelated to work more than they do when they're in the office? Why

(07:01):
because their desire or interest is to invest more in personal matters at the expense of work?
Why? Because his employees are generally freeloaders who would prefer their personal benefit over that
of the organization. Why? Because that's how people are. It's part of human nature. In other
words, ultimately the decision about working from home stems from, among other things, a basic belief

(07:27):
about the nature of human beings. This is just one possibility, of course. There could be a manager
who reaches the conclusion that he opposes working from home for completely different reasons,
and based on opposite beliefs. The way to perform the UN action of unlearning is through working on
our deepest fundamental assumptions. The more we deepen the question of why we do what we do

(07:52):
and why we think what we think, and the more we clarify for ourselves what our fundamental beliefs
about reality are, the better we can understand what motivates us. The more we succeed in somewhat
undermining these fundamental beliefs, whether by adopting different beliefs or by changing the
weight given to each such belief, the more we might discover that something changes in the way we

(08:18):
operate in the world. This process can be done on the individual, meaning on his or her beliefs
about the world, but it can also be done on a team or on the entire organization. It's a bit more
complex, but very rewarding. Here's another example from our experience. We worked with a
biotech research team that had spent decades using traditional high throughput screening methods for

(08:42):
drug discovery. Their fundamental belief was that you need to test thousands of compounds
systematically to find viable drug candidates. When artificial intelligence tools became available
that could predict molecular behavior, the senior researchers dismissed them as black box magic
that couldn't replace rigorous experimental validation. Through unlearning sessions,

(09:07):
we helped them examine this core assumption. They realized their belief stemmed from their
training in an era when computational power was limited. Once they began integrating AI predictions
with targeted experimental validation, their hit rate for promising compounds improved by 60%

(09:28):
and they reduced screening time from months to weeks. The knowledge we acquire throughout life
obviously has very important value in shaping our role, both our formal role at work and our
informal role in life. But this knowledge also functions as a kind of filter that surrounds us
and filters the new knowledge we can learn. The denser our filter, the more it filters so that

(09:52):
less new knowledge can flow in. Think about the air conditioner filter at home. It's important,
it filters materials in the air that we don't want to come inside, but over time it accumulates
dust that blocks the flow of air to the air conditioner until it impairs the air conditioner's
operation itself. To avoid such a situation, we need to clean the filter sometimes. Some of us do this,

(10:18):
some of us wait for a malfunction in the air conditioner and then remember to do what should
have been done earlier. Unlearning is asking what knowledge and experience we've accumulated
might prevent us from seeing and absorbing information. It's the periodic action of
cleaning the air conditioner, which is important. What knowledge hides from us what we don't see

(10:40):
that we need to learn? What knowledge do we need to part with, meaning even though it still serves
us? What problems do we need to learn to solve in a new way, even if the old way still works?
The pace of changes in reality as humanity enters the second quarter of the 21st century
is such that the ability to part with opinions, perceptions and actions we hold on to

(11:06):
is an essential feature. To perfect this feature, we suggest developing curiosity and humility
toward the opinions and perceptions of those around us, challenging and questioning our
fundamental beliefs and framing our knowledge as a filter that might prevent us from accessing
new knowledge. This is not a simple action and involves constant reflective work,

(11:30):
self-honesty and great courage. Usually we join courses, training or coaching to learn something
new, something we don't know. At Co-League, we hope that no less than the learning experience,
participants will also experience significant unlearning.

(11:52):
And that wraps up today's podcast, where we explore the power of unlearning and how it can
transform our understanding and approach to personal and professional growth.
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