I’ve always been an idea-seeker. I thrive on synthesis. I chase connections. When I’m working on something, I cast a wide net: research articles, old case studies, archived interviews, even a quote scribbled in the margin of a book I read years ago. I love finding patterns across disciplines and timelines. That’s what energizes me.
But I started to notice something. For all the range I prided myself on, I was mostly going back to familiar wells. Familiar thinkers. Familiar sources. Familiar tools. They were high quality, but they reflected what I already cared about: leadership, behavior, design thinking, future of work. I wasn’t expanding. I was deepening. Over and over again. Which sounds like growth. Until it isn’t.
I realized I had been using my Ideation strength as a searchlight, not a floodlight. I was tracking ideas that reinforced what I already valued instead of asking, What don’t I know to look for? What perspectives, industries, or provocations live just outside my lens?
That was my unlearning moment.
Not about throwing out what I knew. But seeing how my methods, my trusted ways of exploring, were also quietly narrowing what I could see.
When Expertise Blinds Us
Every leader has a backstory. A set of successes, scars, and instincts that shape how they lead. And that history becomes a lens. It guides decisions. It explains why something worked. But it can also distort. Especially in times of change.
I once coached a senior leader who had a strong track record of building high-performing teams. When I asked how he identified talent, he answered with conviction: “You can tell. Some people just carry themselves like leaders. They know how to speak up, take charge, own the room.”
He wasn’t trying to exclude anyone. He believed he was being intuitive. But he had unknowingly fallen into a performative trap. Leadership to him had become something you exude, not something you grow.
Then came the pivot. His organization launched a reverse mentoring program and he was paired with someone outside his usual orbit. Quieter. Analytical. Not the typical “rising star.” But in those conversations, something shifted. She asked questions that stuck. She pointed out patterns he had missed. She earned trust without commanding attention.
That experience flipped his proximity bias. He realized that for years, he’d been scouting for leaders who reminded him of himself. Afterward, his approach changed. He no longer asked who looked the part. He asked who created impact. Who made others better. Who saw what others didn’t.
That’s the power of unlearning. It doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in human moments. In discomfort. In the willingness to admit, I’ve been looking in the wrong places.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn.
Alvin Toffler, the famous futurist, once wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” That quote shows up in leadership keynotes and HR decks. But here’s the real story behind it.
Toffler didn’t preach change from a distance. He lived it. In search of material to write about, he and his wife, Heidi, spent five years working blue-collar jobs on assembly lines, learning industrial mass production the hard way—by doing it. Heidi became a union shop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder.
At night, Alvin wrote poetry and fiction, only to discover he wasn’t good at either. But what he had was curiosity, humility, and a willingness to live inside the story he wanted to tell. He compared himself to Jack London, who sailed the seas for experience, and John Steinbeck, who picked grapes alongside migrant workers. That immersion led him to a job at a union-backed newspaper, a post in Washington covering Congress, and eventually, a view of the future no one else could see yet.
Toffler knew unlearning wasn’t academic. It was sweaty. Awkward. Sometimes humbling. But it’s what allowed him to keep seeing differently, long after others stopped.
We’re in another such moment now. Except this time, it’s not mechanical. It’s algorithmic. Ecological. Generational.
AI is rewriting what work looks like. Climate shifts are redefining what growth means. A new workforce is reimagining what success requires. The challenge for leaders isn’t just learning more. It’s learning what to let go of.
Unlearning Isn’t Forgetting. It’s Seeing Again.
We talk about growth mindsets, but growth isn’t just about adding knowledge. It’s about removing noise. Carol Dweck’s work is often flattened into slogans, but her deeper insight was this: real growth requires new frames, not just new facts. Changing what we believe about ourselves changes what’s possible. A growth mindset isn’t just about optimism. It’s about the hunger to keep learning and unlearning. As Dweck put it, “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?” That shift (from performance to progress) is where real growth begins.
Psychologist Otto Rank once wrote that therapy is not just about learning new behaviors. It’s about unlearning destructive patterns. Leadership is no different. It’s not just about upgrading skills. It’s about disrupting assumptions.
The Organizational Cost Of Holding On
Unlearning isn’t just personal. A 2018 paper by Kluge and Gronau (aptly titled “Intentional Forgetting in Organizations”) explored unlearning in organizations and found something simple but profound. Innovation doesn’t only come from learning new things. It comes from actively discarding what no longer serves.
Think of performance reviews designed for in-office culture, now applied to hybrid teams. Or succession pipelines still anchored in tenure over future skills. These aren’t small misalignments. They reflect a bigger problem—organizations becoming efficient at outdated things.
Leaders must ask harder questions. Not just What should we do next? but What should we stop doing? Where are we preserving rituals that belong to another time? Where are we clinging to best practices that have quietly expired?
Three Practices For Seeing With New Eyes
Here’s how to practice unlearning—not as a mindset, but as a method.
1. Confront Flawed Thinking: Stress Test What You Believe
Take a belief you hold about how your team works best. Now place it in a new context. Hybrid work. AI augmentation. A younger workforce. Does it still work?
If not, why are you still using it?
2. Accept Your Biases: Name Them. Then Claim Them
Bias isn’t always malicious. Sometimes it’s just familiar. But left unchecked, it distorts everything from hiring to strategy to team dynamics.
Ask yourself: Who gets airtime? Who gets second chances? Whose discomfort do you make space for? The answers will reveal more than any dashboard ever will.
3. Learn With Humility: Reverse The Flow
True unlearning begins when you stop needing to be right. Reverse mentoring isn’t a box to check. It’s a mirror. It reveals what you no longer see.
Sit with someone who doesn’t view the world as you do. Don’t just hear them. Absorb them. Let discomfort become instruction.
A Final Challenge
In this era of reinvention, the most successful leaders won’t be the ones who know the most. They’ll be the ones who keep questioning what they think they know.
So ask yourself:
If someone shadowed your leadership for a week, what would they say you’re still holding onto?
And more importantly, what are you willing to unlearn so you can finally see again?
Your edge won’t come from what you know. It will come from what you’re willing to unlearn.