Is it possible to unsee, to unlearn?

“It's only when you drop yesterday's assumptions that you can glimpse tomorrow's patterns and possibilities. To see deeper, unsee first.”

                                             Umair Haq

Is it possible to unlearn the things we absolutely know to be true?

This odd but interesting question emerged in a series of Twitter posts in the last day or so.

Umair Haq kicked it off when he wrote the above sentence on Twitter: That seemed like an interesting thought. So I retweeted it, with a link to other posts on radical management.

Shawn Callahan shot back (from Australia): “Any suggestions on how to help people unsee?”

I replied (in Twitterese): “How to help people unsee? Good question! 1. Humility. 2 Curiosity. 3. Listen . 4. Story. More tomorrow.” Well, it’s now tomorrow and here are some further thoughts.

In the meantime, Shawn replied to his own question: “I suspect it's impossible to unsee. Rather we replace one seeing (a story) with another. E.g. Robert Keagan's work.” [i]

To understand the issue, we need to distinguish two kinds of situations. One is where we learn something about a subject on which we had no strong habits, opinions or feelings. If I were to study, say, rocket science, I would learn a lot of new things, but it wouldn’t change my existing view of the world significantly. There would be little or nothing to “unsee”.

The other situation is where I learn something new about a subject on which I and others have strong habits, opinions and feelings, many of which are so deep within me that I hardly know they are there. In this situation, my experience is that it is difficult to absorb the new learning, unless I come to terms with the habits, opinions and feelings that I had about my old way of looking at things.

John Seely Brown has written amusingly about this on my sister website, http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org

Learning to unlearn

 The curious thing is that with these exponential changes, so much of what we currently know is just getting to be wrong. So many of our assumptions are getting to be wrong. And so, as we move forward, not only is it going to be a question of learning but it is also going to be a question of unlearning. In fact, a lot of us who are struggling in large corporations know first hand that the hardest task is to get the corporate mind to start to unlearn some of the gospels that have made them successful in the past and that no longer will actually work in the future

 It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think. Because if you look at knowledge, and look at least two different dimensions of knowledge, the explicit dimension and the tacit dimension, the explicit dimension probably represents a tiny fraction of what we really do know, the explicit being the concept, the facts, the theories, the explicit things that live in our head. And the tacit turns out to be much more the practices that we actually use to get things done with.

In fact we need to think about the brilliant distinction that Bruner created some time ago called “learning to be”. It’s easy to learn about something. The tacit is learning to be. There is a tremendous difference between reading a physics book and knowing all the laws of physics. It is something else to being a physicist. And learning to be is what we are talking about when we are talking about this tacit game. 

 Now the problem is that an awful lot of the learning that we need to do is obviously building up this body of knowledge, but even more so the unlearning that we need to do has to do with challenging the tacit. The problem is that most of us can’t easily get a grip on. It is very hard to reflect on the tacit because you don’t even know that you know. And in fact, what you do know is often just dead wrong. And it is almost impossible to change your beliefs about something that is in the tacit and is different from what you happen to think.

    Bringing tacit knowledge up to the surface so that you can do something about it is incredibly complicated. Not only do we in our bodies encode tacit knowledge but our organizations encode tacit knowledge. And so as we try to change the way organizations are run, we are actually trying to change the tacit as well as the explicit, and the trouble with tacit knowledge is that it is almost impossible to get hold of it, reflect on it, and work with it. 

    And of course, part of the power of stories, part of the power of the narrative, is actually creating a framework that our mind seems to understand. You can at least begin to think about how to challenge some of this type of knowledge that is tacit.

Unlearning push

Here’s a recent example. Lang Davison, a co-author of The Power of Pull (2010) was telling me recently about the workshops that were run by the Deloitte’s Center for the Edge with their startling new findings, such as that the rate of return on assets of US companies is one quarter of what it was in 1965. The executives were unwilling to take the studies seriously. “They are living a delusion,” Lang said, “and it’s all the more powerful as it’s a collective delusion, as reflected by the capital markets. We even heard executives say, in response to our findings about declining ROA, that it couldn’t be that bad if the equity markets still value corporate institutions so highly.”

These executives can’t absorb the new learning until they have begun to unlearn what they absolutely and definitely “know”. They have to unlearn. This is difficult because so much of the knowledge is tacit. The knowledge constitutes a kind of spectacles through which we view the world and we are not even conscious that we are wearing them.

Unlearning traditional management

A similar situation that I am grappling with right now is communicating the idea of radical management, which involves a way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace that is fundamentally different from traditional management. The differences can be easily summarized in the table below.

I had no success in even communicating the idea of radical management until I managed to describe the characteristics of traditional management, and point out the specific differences. Before I did that, when I talked about the new ideas involved in radical management, people would say things like, “What’s new about that?” Or “We’re already doing that,” when it was obvious to any observer that they weren’t.

How does unlearning happen?

How does unlearning or unseeing take place? As I suggested in the Twitter post, humility, curiosity and listening are a big part of it. Story, as Shawn also points out, is also a huge part. It’s about not just learning the new story (explicit knowledge), but also living the new story (tacit knowledge) until it becomes part of you. It’s not just understanding why the old story is false. That helps, but you have to go beyond that. You have to live the new story.

Teaching other people how and why the old story is false can also be a huge help in learning to unlearn.

But the unlearning (or unseeing) doesn’t happen instantly. Even as I evangelize about the new kind of workplace, where people are treated as people, and firm focuses on delighting clients, I often find myself unwittingly slipping into the vocabulary of traditional management. I speak about “engineering” a change, instead of inspiring a change; I speak of the “HR Department”, instead of the people department; I salute “the bottom line”, while ignoring “bad profits”; and so on.

And as I edit a second edition of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling , a book I wrote in 2005, I keep coming across sentences that reek of traditional management. Weeding out this anachronistic vocabulary is an arduous job. That’s because it’s the language used in organizations, in business schools, and in management textbooks. And it’s the language that I used as a manager for several decades.

But arduous or easy, the unlearning has to happen. Unless it happens, we will continue to live the old story.

To learn more about radical management, go here.
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

i/  I don't know about Robert Keagan's work (Kegan?) I will leave this one to Shawn to expand on. 

Radical Management vs Traditional Management

Radical management is a fundamentally different way of organizing, thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace. The differences between radical management and traditional management are summarized in the following table:

	Traditional management	Radical management
Goal	The purpose of work is to produce goods or services.	The purpose of work is continuous value innovation that delights clients.
How work is organized	Work is done by individuals reporting to bosses.	Do work through self-organizing teams.
Plan	Work is done in accordance with a comprehensive plan.	Do work in client-driven iterations aimed at continuous innovation.
Measuring progress	As work proceeds, provide progress reports of what is under way.	Deliver value to clients at each iteration.
What is communicated	Communications cover what people need to know.	Total openness about impediments: everyone levels with everyone.
Improvement	Bosses are responsible for productivity.	Continuous self-improvement by the team itself.
How it is communicated	One way communication: send people messages and tell them what to do.	Interactive communication: stories, questions, conversations.

Comments

[Ralf Westphal]

There is a whole dicipline devoted to unseeing/unlearning: it´s NLP (neurolinguistic programming).

But they call it "working with belief systems"; and unlearning takes place through reframing, if I´m not mistaken. (Here´s some literature: http://amzn.to/9mO3El).

Also check out Byron Kathy´s "The Work", www.thework.com.

Unlearning/unseeing is changing what we believe to be true. If we can give up a believe, we´re open to adopt a new view of the world.

-Ralf

[Steve Denning]

Ralf--Thanks for these links. I'll check them out. Steve

[Viv McWaters]

I missed the twitter talk about this - but glad I found your article. I use a similar model when facilitating groups, calling it 'disruptive' facilitation. I no longer hold to the premise that facilitation is about making things easy for groups. All that does it make it easy for people to perpetuate old habits and behaviours. As you point out, language is so important. I use improv games to surface how people really think and behave. The games are brilliant for surfacing many of our assumptions and prejudices. This, I think, is the first step in unlearning.

[Steve Denning]

Viv--Great points. Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games is a related source: using game to spark unlearning and new learning: http://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Games-Creating-Breakthrough-Collaborative/dp/0321437292

[Shawn Callahan]

I agree Steve, learning to be is the crux unlearning or unseeing. Our deepest knowledge comes from what we experience.

This example is a good illustration of what I mean. Last year I was facilitating a workshop on collaboration for a group of senior academics. I mentioned that there are a couple of important behaviours necessary for effective collaboration: the ability to speak truth to power (with good intent and respect); and the need to make and keep promises. As I describe these two behaviours I could see a woman at the back of the workshop shaking her head in utter disagreement. So I stopped what I was saying and asked whether she would like to share what she was thinking. She blurted out that there is no way anyone could speak openly and honestly to a professor (her belief). And that she had done that once in her old department and had to move departments (her experience and story).

This woman had learned that speaking up was a bad move and she'd a strong story in her head that told her that she should avoid it at all costs.

Robert Keagan calls this an Immunity to Change (the title of his last book) and says that an effective way for this person to change is if she can replace her old story with a new story. And to do that you need to help her have new experiences that result in a different outcome. So to help a person or group or organisation to change, leaders, helpers, facilitators should create new experiences that have the new ways of being.

(This is very much like what Jerry Sternin did to help reverse malnutrition among Vietnamese children in the '90s http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2010/06/a-postive-appro.html )

And when new experiences are hard to create then go to the second best way to learn from experience, by telling effective stories.

[Johnnie Moore]

I liked your story Shawn. Intriguingly, you did support that woman in doing precisely what she said she couldn't do - in that situation she felt able to challenge your authority.

[Shawn Callahan]

Hi Johnnie, yes, she was obviously less concerned about outside facilitators than professors.

[Adrian Segar]

Steve: Finding my way here via John Seely Brown's post, I'm intrigued by the parallels between your comparison of traditional and radical management and the comparison of traditional and radical conference design that I describe in my book "Conferences That Work".

Substituting "conference participants" for "clients" in the table provides a set of contrasts surprisingly similar to those I've written about.

Your article validates and illuminates the challenges I face in my work to educate event professionals about alternative ways to design meetings and events. Thanks for that!

[Steve Denning]

Adrian, I agree on the parallel between managing a conference and managing work. In fact, I had written about this last year at http://bit.ly/b6UJIp. Your book sounds very interesting. Steve

[Roanyong]

Hi Steve, I agree with you that 1. Humility. 2 Curiosity. 3. Listen . 4. Story - are helpful to make people 'unsee'. And that it is difficult (almost impossible) to let go tacit knowledge in which we have strong emotion / feeling.

I would like to add that the starting point for 'unlearning' is disconfirmation. That is event that does not hold true with our underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values. For example: I believe that paying people well is enough to guarantee his / her loyalty. When he / she resigned to join a rival company on a lower pay, then I'll get disconfirmation. Disconfirmation will motivate me to 'let go' of my knowledge and learn new knowledge.

Does this makes sense?

Visit my blog: http://roanyong.wordpress.com/

[Steve Denning]

Hi Roanyong,
Yes, it makes sense to a certain extent. An encounter with a "disconfirmation" can be the spark that sets off unlearning. But all too often, it doesn't happen. The employee left for a another firm at a lower salary? "That was because that guy was a loser all along and couldn't make it with us." If we see the apparent disconfirmation through the spectacles of our existing assumptions, then we can ingeniously adjust the world to fit our assumptions! It's called the "confirmation bias". So unless there are some of those other elements -- curiosity, humility, listening -- we may not learn from the disconfirmation. Steve

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