Harness the Power of Unlearning

VUCA, meaning volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, was coined by the military in 1987 to describe exceptional conditions. By 2021 it was just describing Tuesday.

Demographic shifts, rapid urbanization, economic power moving between regions, technology accelerating, globalization, and then COVID on top of all of it. Work, school, socializing, shopping. The in-person world became virtual almost overnight.

What struck me watching it was that people adapted far better than anyone would have predicted. We saw agility and adaptability in their truest form, and nearly all of it came down to a capacity to learn and relearn.

But relearning has a prerequisite that almost nobody talks about. You have to unlearn first.

That's the argument here. We treat learning as accumulation. Add skills, add knowledge, add tools. Unlearning is the harder discipline, deliberately letting go of what's become familiar and comfortable but no longer serves. It's harder because the things needing to go aren't obviously wrong. They're things that worked. Often things that worked so well they became identity.

This idea became a permanent part of how I think about learning, and it shows up in the lifelong-learner cycle of learn, do, unlearn that runs through a lot of my later writing. This is where I worked it out.

For anyone who's noticed their hardest-won expertise has become the thing holding them back.