The Leadership Capability Nobody Is Talking About: How to Unlearn
There is a reason most leadership development does not change behaviour. It focuses entirely on adding new knowledge. It almost never addresses what needs to be let go first.
Unlearning is the deliberate process of identifying and releasing an established belief, habit or behavioural pattern that is blocking new learning. It is not forgetting. It is not failure. It is the necessary precondition for genuine change — and it is one of the most consistently underinvested capabilities in leadership development.
A 2022 systematic review of 59 studies on organisational resilience and learning (Evenseth, Sydnes & Gausdal) identified unlearning as a critical and largely overlooked element of how organisations build resilience. The finding was specific: the greater the capacity for unlearning, the stronger the positive effect of learning on resilience. Not marginally stronger. Significantly stronger.
Why Unlearning Is Harder Than Learning
New knowledge does not override established patterns. It sits alongside them, competing for influence. The brain, as covered in an earlier blog in this series, is wired for efficiency — it will default to the familiar pattern, particularly under pressure, unless something has actively displaced it.
That displacement is unlearning. It requires the leader to first notice that an established pattern exists, then to honestly assess whether that pattern is still serving them, and then to make a deliberate choice to release it — even when the release feels uncomfortable, because familiarity, even of unhelpful patterns, has a kind of cognitive comfort to it.
The Attitude dimension of The Resilience Wheel is directly relevant here. The Attitude dimension is described as the leader’s settled way of thinking and feeling about life — their values, their beliefs, their habitual interpretations of events. When those settled beliefs are genuinely serving the leader, the Attitude dimension is a source of strength. When they are outdated, misaligned or simply no longer fit for the conditions being navigated, they become the primary obstacle to development. Unlearning is the practice of updating the Attitude dimension rather than simply reinforcing it.
“You cannot install a new operating system on top of an old one that has never been cleared. Unlearning is the clearing.”
You need to clear some space from your “operating system” to allow room for something better. Photo Getty Images Unsplash
What Unlearning Looks Like in Practice
Unlearning is not dramatic. It rarely announces itself. It tends to show up in small, specific moments: the leader who catches themselves about to give the answer rather than ask the question, pauses, and asks instead. The leader who notices the familiar impulse to take the decision back from the person it has been delegated to, and chooses not to. The leader who recognises a long-established interpretation of a colleague’s behaviour and consciously holds it lightly enough to consider an alternative.
These moments are not natural. They require a level of self-awareness that is only possible when a leader has developed a reflective practice — a consistent habit of looking honestly at their own behaviour and its effects. The three Resilience Wheel reflective questions are designed for exactly this:
• What have I been doing recently, behaviourally, against The Resilience Wheel, that has been serving me well?
• What have I not been doing recently, behaviourally, against The Resilience Wheel, that has not been serving me well?
• How can I do more of the behaviours in the first answer?
The second question is the unlearning question. It asks not for more information about what the leader should be doing, but for honest identification of what they are currently doing that is not serving them. That identification is the beginning of release.
Unlearning in Teams and Organisations
The concept applies at every level. Teams develop collective unlearning challenges — shared assumptions, established ways of handling conflict, default responses to disruption — that become invisible precisely because they are shared. Nobody questions them because everybody operates within them.
The research on organisational resilience is clear that this collective unlearning is one of the most difficult and most necessary things an organisation can do. Evenseth et al. (2022) found that organisational resistance to change — the primary impediment to organisational learning — is itself an unlearning challenge. The structures, mental models and behavioural norms that made an organisation successful in its previous context can become the primary obstacles to its resilience in the next one.
A genuinely resilient organisation does not simply accumulate better practices over time. It periodically and deliberately lets go of the practices that are no longer fit for purpose, to create the space for new ones. This is what the research means when it describes resilience as a metamorphosis cycle rather than a recovery process.
The Courage Dimension of Unlearning
Unlearning requires something that most leadership development programmes do not explicitly develop: the courage to acknowledge that an established pattern — one that has perhaps been successful for years — is no longer serving you or the people around you.
This is not a comfortable acknowledgement. For leaders whose identity is closely tied to their expertise or their style, it can feel like a significant concession. The Meaning dimension of The Resilience Wheel is relevant here: the story a leader tells themselves about who they are and what makes them effective. When that story includes a particular approach that now needs to be released, the unlearning challenge is not just behavioural. It is narrative.
The leaders who navigate this most effectively are those who have a clear enough sense of their Purpose — what they are building and why — that the development of their capability in service of that purpose feels more compelling than the protection of their existing patterns. Purpose makes unlearning purposeful, rather than simply uncomfortable.
A question worth sitting with
What is one belief, habit or leadership pattern that you know is not currently serving you or the people around you — and that you have been maintaining anyway, because it is familiar?
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