I wrote in Radical Next that unlearning ranks among the most valuable and most underrated skills we have.
Here's why I believe it more every year.
What's the pattern?
Every expert is a collection of things that used to be true.
The doctor trained in 1995 learned a set of rules that were right in 1995. The marketer who mastered search in 2010 mastered a search that no longer exists. The manager who learned to run a room learned it for rooms that are now half video.
Learning is easy to see and easy to reward. Unlearning is invisible. Nobody gets a certificate for letting go of a method that no longer works. But the people who get stuck in every transition are never the ones who couldn't learn. They're the ones who couldn't stop knowing.
I think of it like the maze I describe in my next book. Every path you walk often enough becomes a wall in your mind. The more expert you are, the more walls. Unlearning is tearing one down on purpose, before the maze gets too small to move in.
Skydiving taught me this the hard way. Every instinct a body has about falling is wrong. You unlearn them or you don't jump twice.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Keep an unlearning list. Next to what you want to learn this year, write what you need to stop believing. It's harder to fill in, which tells you something.
Ask experts what they've changed their mind about. It's the best interview question I know. The ones who can't answer are the ones whose expertise has hardened into walls.
And make it safe to say "that's how I used to do it." A team that can say that out loud unlearns fast. A team that has to pretend it was always right can't.
The future doesn't belong to whoever learns fastest. It belongs to whoever can let go fastest, and still stand up.
What did you believe five years ago that you'd be embarrassed to say today?
Related: Why do smart organizations keep making the same change twice?
- Sam Rad, Radical Next (2025), Knowledge and Education chapter, on unlearning.
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