THE COURAGE TO UNLEARN

The courage to unlearn gives an organisation a future, contends LINUS OKORIE There is a stage in leadership when experience stops being an advantage and quietly becomes a liability. It happens when a leader becomes so confident in what has worked that they stop questioning whether it still will. The strategy that built the company becomes untouchable. The product that created the brand becomes sacred. The management style that produced results becomes the default. The assumptions that once gave the organization an advantage become so familiar that nobody thinks to challenge them. This is one of the most dangerous transitions in leadership. Because the world can change while the leader is still using yesterday’s map. One of the most instructive examples came from Intel. In its early years, Intel built much of its reputation and commercial strength around memory chips. The company had developed deep technical expertise in the business, and memory was central to its identity. Then the competitive landscape changed. Japanese semiconductor manufacturers began producing memory chips at increasingly competitive prices, putting enormous pressure on American companies. Intel’s leadership initially tried to fight its way back into profitability. But the numbers kept telling a different story. The question eventually became bigger than how to improve the memory-chip business. It became: Should Intel remain the company it had become, or become the company the future required? Andy Grove and Gordon Moore faced a decision that demanded something more difficult than innovation. They had to let go. Intel moved away from memory and increasingly committed itself to microprocessors. That decision helped transform the company and positioned it at the center of the personal-computing revolution. What makes the story remarkable is that Intel did not simply learn something new. It had to unlearn something that had made it successful. That is a fundamentally different leadership challenge. Learning asks: “What do we need to know?” Unlearning asks: “What do we believe that is no longer true?” The second question is harder because beliefs become attached to people. They become attached to careers, investments, reputations and identities. An executive who spent years building a particular strategy may find it difficult to accept that the strategy has run its course. A founder may struggle to replace a management structure that worked beautifully when the company was small. A senior leader may continue using a leadership style that delivered results in one generation but frustrates another. A company may continue investing in a product because it once defined the organization, even as customers have moved on. This is why success can be dangerous. Failure forces questions. Success often postpones them. When the numbers are good, there is little incentive to ask whether the underlying assumptions are becoming obsolete. But markets do not freeze because an organization is performing well. Technology changes. Customers change. Competitors change. Employees change. The basis of competition changes. The executive’s responsibility is therefore not simply to protect today’s success. It is to recognize when the foundations of that success are beginning to shift. Consider Nokia. There was a time when Nokia’s name was almost synonymous with mobile phones. It had enormous market presence, a powerful brand and considerable engineering capability. But the mobile-phone industry was transformed by the rise of smartphones. The competition was no longer primarily about making a reliable handset. The value proposition had changed. Software, ecosystems, applications, user experience and developer communities became increasingly important. The lesson is not that Nokia lacked intelligent people. It is that intelligence inside an organization is not enough if the organization is interpreting a new world through an old model. The question for leaders is not only, “How good are we?” It is also, “Are we still solving the problem that customers now care about?” This distinction matters in every industry. A bank can have an excellent branch network while customers increasingly prefer digital services. A media company can produce quality content while audiences change how they consume it. A school can have a respected history while the skills required by the next generation of students evolve. A manufacturing company can operate an efficient production system while new technology changes the economics of its industry. The old model may not have been wrong. It may simply have reached its expiration date. That is why leaders must learn to separate principles from methods. The principle may remain. The method may need to change. A commitment to excellent customer service does not require keeping the same customer-service model forever. A commitment to quality does not mean refusing new technology. A company’s mission can remain stable while its strategy changes dramatically. This is where strategic maturity begins. Great leaders are not loyal to methods. They are loyal to purpose. This also requires leaders to become comfortable with being wrong. Not every old decision was a mistake simply because circumstances changed. A strategy can be completely rational when it is chosen and completely unsuitable several years later. The mistake is not changing it. The mistake is allowing pride to turn history into policy. This is particularly relevant for executives who have been successful for a long time. Experience creates pattern recognition, but it can also create blind spots. A leader begins to think: “We have tried that before.” “Our customers don’t want that.” “That is not how our industry works.” “We have always done it this way.” Sometimes these statements are wisdom. Sometimes they are warnings. The difference is whether the leader is using experience to understand the present or using the past to avoid confronting it. One practical discipline is to periodically ask questions that challenge the organization’s most comfortable assumptions. What would we stop doing if we were starting today? Which of our products exists mainly because we are emotionally attached to it? What are customers doing differently that we have not yet responded to? Which competitors are solving tomorrow’s problem better than we are? What part of our business model would be hardest for us to abandon? And perhaps the most uncomfortable: If we were not already successful, would we choose this strategy today? These questions create something every organization needs: the capacity for renewal. They also require leaders to create room for disagreement. If everyone around the executive has learned that challenging the established view is dangerous, the organization will become increasingly certain at precisely the moment it should be questioning itself. Leaders should therefore listen to people who see the organization differently. Younger employees often experience changes in technology and consumer behavior differently from senior executives. Customers can see problems that internal teams have become accustomed to. Competitors can expose weaknesses that insiders have learned to rationalize. Dissent is not always disloyalty. Sometimes it is an organization’s early-warning system. And there is another difficult reality. Unlearning often involves loss. It may require abandoning investments. Changing structures. Retraining employees. Admitting that a previous strategy no longer works. Giving up authority. Walking away from something that still feels familiar. That is why unlearning is not primarily an intellectual exercise. It is an act of leadership courage. The leader must be willing to say: “This worked. It mattered. We built something valuable with it. But the future requires something different.” That statement does not diminish the past. It protects the future. The most resilient organizations are not those that change everything constantly. They are those that know what must never change and what must. They preserve their purpose while questioning their assumptions. They protect their values while reinventing their methods. They honor their history without becoming prisoners of it. This is perhaps one of the most important responsibilities of an executive: to prevent yesterday’s success from becoming tomorrow’s limitation. Because organizations rarely collapse simply because they cannot learn. Sometimes they collapse because they cannot let go of what they have already learned. The future will continually challenge leaders to reconsider what they think they know. The question is whether we will have the humility to listen. Whether we will have the discipline to examine our assumptions. And whether we will have the courage to release what once worked before it becomes the thing holding us back. The courage to learn gives an organization knowledge. The courage to unlearn gives it a future. Okorie MFR is a leadership development expert spanning 30 years in the research, teaching and coaching of leadership in Africa and across the world. He is the CEO of the GOTNI Leadership Centre. www.gotni.africa