Unlearn summary

Andy Grove – CEO of Intel – had a crisis on his hands. Market demand for Intel’s memory chips was plummeting. Unless Grove did something radical, the business was going to die. As he mulled over the crisis, Grove asked his co-worker what a new CEO might do to save the company. His co-worker said they’d move away from memory chips.

This was a light-bulb moment for Grove. He decided to do what someone from the outside would do. Immediately, he shifted the company to producing microprocessors. Instead of being wedded to a failing business plan, he looked at the situation from a new point of view and found a strategy to overcome his obstacle. 

How often have you attended a leaders’ retreat and come back flooded with new ideas, only to revert to old habits within weeks? Why is it that these training sessions don’t bring the lasting changes you want?

The business environment is in constant flux, but – unfortunately – your neural pathways aren’t. This means that you’ll use strategies from the past, even in the face of different circumstances. And while your previous decisions might have been solid, there’s a risk they won’t work now. What you need is a system that helps you find the solution that best suits your present situation.

You may have heard of the popular app that transforms couch potatoes into marathon runners in just six months. If you’re a non-runner, this probably sounds outlandish. But the app designers understand something crucial: huge goals can be achieved by consistently taking small steps. That’s why their exercise sessions start with just a simple ten-minute walk. Then, sessions slowly increase in duration and intensity to build fitness alongside motivation.

The second phase of the Cycle of Unlearning is relearning, and it follows a similar model to the app. In the first phase of unlearning, you’ve challenged your original mind-set. Now, you need to question your preconceptions about what’s possible – just like the non-runner does when they sign-up to the app. 

Scientist, inventor, and artist Leonardo da Vinci had a revolutionary approach to problem-solving. He wrote down questions about the big mysteries of his time. While this may not seem particularly groundbreaking now, it was in the 1400s. Scientific method hadn’t been developed yet, so asking questions wasn’t the standard way of finding solutions.

Adopting a questioning mind-set is crucial to the third phase of the Cycle of Unlearning – which is breakthrough. Breakthrough occurs after you’ve gained new information by taking small steps toward your goal. 

If you’re a leader, your management training is probably outdated by several centuries. You may not realize this, but the model that most leaders use was developed during the Industrial Era – a time when the average worker had no formal education. They were trained to perform one job, following a process developed by their boss.

But the contemporary workplace is radically different. People aren’t just cogs in the machine, employed to follow orders. They’re the source of innovation. If your employees are just going through motions that you’ve dictated, you’ve conditioned them to follow, and this means they won’t be empowered to problem-solve.

When John Legere became CEO of T-Mobile, he listened in on customer service calls for three hours, every single day. He wanted to find out what was causing customer issues, and he knew the best way to get this insight was directly from them.

Legere could have asked his team to prepare a report on customer feedback. But this would have taken time. It also would have resulted in a sanitized account of how T-Mobile products were really performing, since Legere’s managers would’ve filtered feedback into a nice, neat report. Listening into calls gave Legere an uncensored view of what his customers really thought.

In 2011, the British government scrapped the development of software that would give healthcare workers access to digitized patient records. Before it was terminated, the software had cost the United Kingdom an astounding £12.4 billion. The project involved many reputable contractors. But none of them had managed to work together to overcome the obstacles they encountered. Instead, they blamed each other until the entire project fell apart.

But an extraordinary lesson in unlearning rose from the ashes of this fiasco. A team of just 30 people, led by Andrew Meyer, were tasked with creating Spine 2 – the IT infrastructure that would connect over 23,000 healthcare systems across the United Kingdom. With a limited budget and many bureaucratic hoops to jump through, Meyer had to be savvy with his resources. That meant thinking about product development in a new way.