Episode 872 - The "Unlearning" Mandate

0:04 Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goal achieving. This is the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast with your host, Paul Falavolito.

0:22 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode 872. There is a new skill quietly moving toward the top. of the list for companies trying to figure out who is going to succeed in the age of artificial intelligence. It isn't coding. It isn't prompt engineering. It isn't knowing how to use every new AI platform that gets released this week. It's the ability to unlearn. And yes, you heard that correctly. The ability to unlearn. And I think this is going to become one of the most important leadership conversations we have over the next few years because companies are discovering something fascinating. Teaching somebody a new technology can actually be easier than getting them to stop

1:15 working the way they've worked for the last 10 or 20 years. Think about that. You can put a new piece of software in front of somebody and teach them how to operate it. The bigger challenge comes five minutes later when they take that brand new technology and try to force their old workflow through it. They learn the new system while keeping the old behavior. That's where organizations get stuck. And here's some interesting research happening around this.

1:46 The 2026 Talent LMS Learning and Development Benchmark Report found that 73% of HR managers believe generative AI will accelerate the need for employees to unlearn outdated skills and practices. That number caught my attention, 73%. We're entering an era where your ability to forget some of what made you successful yesterday may become almost as valuable as your ability to learn something new tomorrow. That's a major change in how we think about experience. For most of our careers, experience has been treated almost entirely as an asset. You've been doing something for 20 years. Fantastic. You know the business.

2:37 You understand the system. You've seen everything. And experience absolutely matters. I believe that deeply. But experience comes with baggage. Every year you work somewhere, you accumulate habits. This is how we do the schedule. This is how we write the report. This is how we process the order. This is how we communicate with customers. This is how we've always handled that. Eventually, nobody remembers why the process exists. They know that it exists, and then automation walks through the front door. Suddenly, a process that required six steps now might require two. A report that took an employee two hours to might take 15 minutes. A manager who spent half of Monday collecting information may have that information automatically waiting for them. And

3:31 somebody inevitably says, but we've always done it this way. Those may become some of the most expensive words in business because the organization buys the technology, pays for the implementation, pays for training, and then employees recreate the old system inside the new technology. I've seen versions of this throughout my career. Organizations replace paper forms with electronic forms, and then somebody prints the electronic form. They fill it out, they scan it, they email it, and then somebody else saves the PDF. And congratulations, you have successfully used technology to make the old process more complicated. That's not transformation, that's just digital paperwork. And AI is going to expose

4:18 this problem on a much larger scale. The conference board reported this year that AI is already disrupting tasks and reshaping jobs, while many organizations remain focused primarily on helping employees perform their existing roles instead of preparing them for larger workforce changes. That's the leadership problem. We keep asking, how do we teach people AI? Maybe leaders need to start asking, What do our people need to stop doing because AI now exists? That's a completely different conversation to have with your people. Imagine you're introducing automation into your organization.

5:02 Before you schedule another two-hour training class about buttons, features, dashboards, and commands, gather your team around a table, put your existing workflow on the screen, and ask them, If we were creating this process today knowing everything we know and having access to the technology we have now, would we still design it this way? That question could save organizations thousands of hours and thousands of dollars because some procedures exist for reasons that disappeared years ago. Some reports are produced because somebody requested them in 2017. Some meetings exist because somebody scheduled the first one and nobody ever canceled the recurring invitation. Some approvals exist because a former employee

5:53 made a mistake 12 years ago. And some spreadsheet exists because the software that replaced them never actually replaced them. The organization changed. The process survived. And that is an organizational scar. And leaders have to become leaders. comfortable removing it. This also changes what we should look for when hiring and promoting people. One of the most valuable employees in your organization may soon be the person who can say, I've done this successfully for 15 years and I'm willing to completely rethink how I do it. That's maturity, that's adaptability, and that takes confidence because unlearning can feel threatening. People attach identity to experience. I've been the person who knows

6:44 the system. I've been the person everybody comes to. I've been the expert. And then suddenly the system changes. Automation handles part of the work. AI handles another part. And the employee starts wondering, where does that leave me? This is where leadership matters. Our job cannot be to walk into the workplace announcing that AI is going to make everybody more productive. People need help understanding where they fit into the new workflow, and leaders need to protect something important while doing this, human judgment. Boston Consulting Group surveyed senior executives and found that half were already observing some level of de-skilling related to AI use. More than 60% believed de-skilling could become a material organizational threat. within the

7:37 next three to five years. So unlearning doesn't mean forgetting everything you know. It means knowing what to release and knowing what must remain. We should absolutely unlearn pointless administrative habits. We should unlearn inefficient workflows. We should unlearn processes designed around technology that no longer exists. We should never surrender judgment, accountability, critical thinking, or professional experience. AI can process information. The human still owns the outcome. That's going to become an important distinction. And leaders are going to have to model this behavior themselves. You cannot ask a 25-year employee to reconsider how they work while senior leadership refuses to reconsider

8:28 how the organization operates. If we're asking employees to unlearn, leaders have to go first. Look at your own calendar, your meetings, your approval process, your reports, your communication habits, your organizational structure, and ask yourself, what am I still doing because it works, and what am I still doing because it's familiar? Those are not the same thing. This idea actually fits something I've believed about leadership for a long time. Leadership growth happens through intentional moments, We don't become better leaders because we sat through another seminar. We become better when we examine what we're doing, make an adjustment, and then put that adjustment into practice. Sometimes growth means

9:18 adding something. Sometimes growth means removing something. And I think removal is about to become incredibly valuable. The future employee isn't going to be the person who memorized the most software or The software will change. The AI platforms will change. The workflows will change. The employee who becomes incredibly valuable is the one who can look at a new environment and say, okay, show me how the game has changed, then adapt. That same expectation applies to leaders. Your experience matters.

9:53 Your institutional knowledge matters. Your scars matter. But none of those things give us permission to drag yesterday's operating system into tomorrow's workplace. So here's something I want you to think about today. Look at one process in your organization that everybody accepts as normal. Ask why you still do it that way. If the answer is because that's how we've always done it, you may have found something worth unlearning.

10:27 The next great leadership skill may have very little to do with how quickly you learn. It may have everything to do with how quickly you can let it go. This has been the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening.