This piece is adapted from the new book The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown, by Terence Mauri. Mauri is the founder of the Hack Future Lab in New York City, a a global think tank that advises government, media, business, and NGOs on emerging trends and signals.
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“Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.”
– Larry Niven
When was the last time you tried to unlearn something? In a recent fireside chat with Professor Amy Edmondson, the author of The Right Side of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, we discussed why good leaders learn from mistakes, but the best leaders unlearn as well, whether it’s outdated ways of working or taken-for-granted assumptions about leadership, or the future.1 As a self-taught tennis player, I have experienced the personal challenge of unlearning how to serve a tennis ball. This was trickier than I expected, as I had to let go of the familiar and step into the unknown again. It required humility to recognize that I had terrible habits when I served and the vulnerability to speak to a coach to get help. When we watch professional tennis players compete, or any elite sports player, we think of their game as fully formed, but a player’s game requires deliberate and focused unlearning, which I define as the capacity to reflect (Humility), rethink (Agility), and renew (Growth).
Unlearning could be the highest form of learning in a post-AI world. It’s the ultimate insurance policy against zombie leadership (dead leadership that fails to adapt to changing circumstances) and “enshittification” – a term coined by academic Cary Doctorow to describe the slow decay in everything we do. It is at the heart of every future-focused organization, allowing leaders to focus on accelerated growth and rethink outdated mindsets. At its core, unlearning is a leadership activity that helps us move from reactive to proactive resilience, tackling performance gaps before they occur; leaders update their assumptions and behaviors to make space for new learning and keep pace with change or even anticipate it. We can’t put more into an empty cup. Unlearning ensures that busy, distracted leaders can overcome FOBO – Fear of Becoming Obsolete, stemming from blind spots such as narrow ambition (thinking too small), fragmented alignment (lack of unity), or execution certainty (lack of focus and commitment). Unlearning for leaders is a skill set but also a mindset for leaning into the discomfort of change and being willing to think and act differently to lead from the future, not the past.
The Half-Life of Everything is the time it takes for something to lose its currency before it is innovated away, and it’s getting exponentially shorter as AI speeds up “disruption everywhere and all at once.”
Learning for Today While Unlearning for Tomorrow
Before futurists became a “thing,” writer Alvin Toffler said, “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”3 In leadership, the most valuable currency is not how much you know but how well you learn, relearn, and unlearn. Emerging research on neuroplasticity shows that our brains continuously create new growth pathways and discard others, and when we learn something new, we build new connections between our neurons. Like our leadership, our brains can adapt to new contexts, constraints, and challenges if we use unlearning to find the upside in disruption. The more I think about the limitless potential of unlearning, the more convinced I am that leaders share a universal shortcoming because there’s a lot we need to unlearn as the world evolves faster and the “Half-Life of Everything” is speeding up the urgency to unlearn.
The Half-Life of Everything is the time it takes for something to lose its currency before it is innovated away, and it’s getting exponentially shorter as AI speeds up “disruption everywhere and all at once.”
• The half-life of skills is 5 years, and technical skills are 2.5 years or less
• The half-life of competitive advantage is less than 18 months for S&P 500 companies
• The average CEO tenure of S&P 500 companies has decreased by 20% from 6 years in 2018 to 4.5 years today
• In science, the half-life of medical knowledge is 24 months, and it is projected to reach 100 days by 2027.
As organizational speed increases, so must the rate of unlearning, or we risk falling behind and losing permanent relevancy. Disruption is the rule. The problem is that leaders need help to prepare for the Half-Life of Everything because they excel at adding complexity to complexity and have a bias against subtraction; they need to improve at elimination because they are drowning in data and information. Perhaps the challenge of our times isn’t learning; it’s unlearning.
Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown by Terence Mauri. Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.
Terence Mauri is a global expert on leadership, AI, and disruption, founder of Hack Future Lab, and author of The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown (Wiley, Sept. 4, 2024).
