Last June, Bill wrote a piece on Learning is Easy, Unlearning is the Trick, where he talked about how important unlearning and relearning is to an organizational transformation. One of my favorite quotes from the post is,
It takes a sound intellect and a fair degree of self confidence to abandon something you know and have believed in, and replace it with something new. That is especially true if your faith in that something has served you well and your knowledge of the new thing is a little shaky. The easy path is to keep all of your beliefs intact and only adopt the bits and pieces of the new idea that supplement those beliefs.
I know more than a few politicians, from both sides of the aisle, that should take that to heart. Not to mention a lot of manufacturing execs.
For some reason his post has been very popular among a rather unique audience. Every few days, out of pure curiousity, I take a look at the blog stats. I can tell what search terms were used to find Evolving Excellence, and where the visitor is located. At least once a day someone finds Bill’s post by searching on "unlearning." Every one of them has been from India.
What is driving this fascination with unlearning in India? Is there a cultural issue that makes unlearning more difficult? As they absorb more and more outsourced production and services from western countries, do they need to unlearn old cultural attributes and relearn new ones? Digging into the other search results gave no additional clues.
Perhaps the more important question should be why is no one from outside of India trying to learn more about unlearning.
Many of us just returned from this year’s AME Annual Conference in Dallas, the largest lean learning event around. Listening, participating, and learning is the easy part. Unlearning our past experience-driven knowledge is the hard part. Learning how to execute a kaizen event is easy, unlearning twenty years of traditional standard cost management and then relearning lean accounting is tough.
Many consultants are making a buck promoting "learning organizatons." Perhaps we should be promoting "unlearning organizations" instead.
Mark Jaeger says
Kevin suggests: “Many consultants are making a buck promoting ‘learning organizations.’ Perhaps we should be promoting ‘unlearning organizations’ instead.” We may need to curse Peter Senge for popularizing the Learning Organization, but Alfred Korzybski and S. I. Hayakawa’s general sematics tells us that we can apply mental hygiene to resist such marginalizing. “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined.”
Perhaps this is just an instance of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that our grammar shapes our perception of the world. After all, who would expect that an empty gasoline tank is more dangerous (likely to explode) than a full one.
[It’s the combination of combustion precursors – gasoline and air – that make an empty tank explosive, and the relative absence of air that protects the full tank safer — a fact that saved my hometown highway department’s trucks during a garage fire because they were in the habit of topping off the tanks at the end of each day.]
Jon Miller says
It’s a bit unfortunate that people have glommed onto the “learning organization” as a way to describe Toyota. It might have been a convenient bridge from Senge to Liker but it’s not accurate.
First of all, organizations don’t learn. Individuals do. Second, Toyota is a teaching organization (or an organization of people who teach as a way of managing, since organizations don’t teach either) if you have to give it a name.
When you enter a so-called teaching organization as a new hire, you are educated by those you report to. You can’t avoid learning if you want to keep your job. You are taught to do you job correctly (following Standard Work), think and solve problems through kaizen.
Most of what we have to “unlearn” we learn passively or by trial and error, or by perpetuating the myths confused as facts or “because we’ve always done it” a certain way.
If there is intentional teaching that is directed from a long-term sense of vision and values, you don’t have to unlearn so much as paint over old or obsolete knowledge with the new.
Jon