Unlearning, Adaptation & Transformation
Daniel Bluzer-Fry, adjunct senior industry fellow at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas, development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Sally McNamara, and Soolin Barclay, alongside fellow adjunct senior industry fellows Kate Spencer and Helen Babb Delia.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
- Alvin Toffler, Futurist, 1928–2016
So much of how we think about education, adaptation and transformation is tied to learning. Yet the interrelated concept of ‘unlearning’ is often peripheral at both organisational and individual levels.
In their conceptual article and literature review ‘The Process of Individual Unlearning: A neglected topic in an under researched field’, Hislop et al note:
Change often involves not only the learning of new behaviours, ideas, or practices but also giving up or abandoning some established ones. Despite both these elements generally being important to change, academic focus on processes of abandoning or giving up established knowledge and practices, that is, unlearning, is lacking.
-Hislop, Bosley, Crispin, Coombs and Holland (2014)
Written close to 10 years ago, a scan of scholarly publications on the topic since suggests that there is still rather little enquiry on this topic.
Yet in a world in which many would argue that the rate of change is accelerating, with both collective and individual outcomes being heavily influenced by our ability to successfully adapt and respond to change, perhaps it has never been more important to reacquaint ourselves with the importance of unlearning, and the role it will have to play in our futures.
Unlearning can best be thought of as the deliberate abandoning or giving up of knowledge, values or behaviours. It is not the same as ‘forgetting’, which lacks the deliberateness or intentionality of unlearning.
What is ‘unlearned’ by individuals is not considered permanently lost or destroyed, and may be drawn upon in the future.
And unlearning appears to happen broadly, at two different levels. One being more shallow ( categorised as ‘wiping’), whilst the other being more deep (categorised as ‘deep unlearning’).
Wiping
So the old way … you can’t do that. We have a new system, new policy, and you have to forget all of the old ways of doing things. Why else would you unlearn something that isn’t obsolete?
-Colette, 35 Melbourne
Much of the scholarly literature on the topic of unlearning, has been focused upon organisational contexts, which was what Colette initially thought about when we discussed her experiences of having to unlearn over the course of her life. She has worked in a variety of social services organisations and been forced to adapt her behaviours due to process and/or policy change many times.
Colette’s example is a perfect example of Wiping, which in organisational literature on unlearning is considered a “deliberated process of change that has been externally imposed … typically focused on a relatively narrow practice or activity where a change initiative requires a person to consciously make deliberate attempts to give up a particular way of thinking and acting” (Hislop et al, 2004).
This lighter, more narrow level of unlearning can also be conceptualised beyond organisational contexts (i.e. separate from our work).
Take the instance of a social footballer who is told by their coach to change their kicking action in order to get better penetration and accuracy, the budding guitarist who is told they need to adapt their hand technique to better scale a fretboard and/or avoid RSI … or the gym enthusiast who is told they’ve been deadlifting incorrectly and have to shift their posture and utilise previously unused muscles to derive the true benefits of the activity.
Wiping appears to be typically done with an eye to some specific form of productivity gain.
Presently, with the explosion of generative AI tools, many workers are doing a wiping of sorts, unlearning previous work-related processes as they incorporate these tools into their working lives.
Take for instance the business analyst who is utilising Chat GPT to expedite a market competitor review or a content writer who is utilising the tool to draft initial PR pieces. Photographers too are harnessing these tools, as best evidenced by Boris Eldagsen’s recent award winning submission to the Sony World Photography award with a composition he created using Dall-E with the intention of creating a public debate about the art form.
Wiping is not considered to be something that can be done without some degree of difficulty, for both organisations and individuals. Resistance to change has been identified as core to this.
In short, if people don’t regard change as favourable, they will show greater resistance (and vice versa). Yet ultimately, given the ‘narrowly focused practice or activity’ that wiping occurs in, this level of unlearning proves less challenging than the unlearning that happens at a deeper level.
Deep Unlearning
Unlearning, to me, is a process of realising that what you took on as truth or accepted reality isn’t actually the right choice … It’s actually hindering you … you realise that this accepted reality you’ve been going along with, or way of doing things just doesn’t work anymore, [and] you can’t then go back to how you felt before
- Rebecca, 32, Melbourne
Rebecca has been undertaking a variety of courses over the past 18 months and has a busy learning schedule ahead of her. With the guidance of a close mentor and friend, she has commenced her practice as a somatic sexologist. Her path to this point has been far from linear.
Having initially studied a B.A at The University of Nottingham, after graduating, she went into the automotive industry. A couple of years later, she determined that she didn’t want to progress down that path, and was seeking something more fulfilling. Perhaps it was a deeper kind of unlearning experience that recast her path and trajectory:
My pleasure practice drastically changed. It went from me thinking that what I was doing was really good, exactly what I wanted. I was feeling lots of pleasure in my body, I felt like I could give myself what I wanted in the moment.
And then I realised that I was still just playing into this process of just going along a with a set stage of procedures to get an end result, instead of actually listening to what my body really wanted, and giving her that. That meant that actually, it wasn’t really focused around pleasure the whole time. Sometimes what I really needed was to just hold myself in those challenging emotions, and not abandon myself. And so this whole definition of what female pleasure was about changed for me.
Today, Rebecca’s sexological body work sees her spend time with individuals along with couples, getting people to better understand their bodies and pleasure practices. She’s worked with a variety of people from different cultural backgrounds and vastly different life stages. One day, she may be working with a CALD couple who have spent several years struggling to find sexual connectivity after an arranged marriage, and the next, it may be a couple who’ve spent several decades together looking to enhance their relationship as they enter their seventies. The diversity of work she does keeps her both stimulated and inspired, as she makes a tangible impact on the wellbeing of her clients. In some respects, it feels like the core of her practice is helping people unlearn at a more profound level.
A lot of the narratives and scripts, and just a lot of societal and cultural norms just don’t really allow the individual the time and space to really think about and choose what’s right for them. We just get given a lot of unhelpful information which I’ve definitely had to unlearn.
‘Deep unlearning’ (or ‘transformative unlearning’) forces us to question basic and core assumptions, values, knowledge and behaviours, in a manner that is considered both emotional and challenging. It is not limited to a narrow practice or activity, as is the case with wiping.
The theory of ‘transformative unlearning’ notes three distinct stages that we progress through that emphasise the heightened degree of difficulty that comes with ultimately letting go of our existing mental models.
To begin with, there needs to be a receptiveness to alternative perspectives and viewpoints. Once this receptiveness is established, there needs to be recognition of the legitimacy of alternative viewpoints and the limitations of one’s own perspectives. But to complete the process, there is then grieving — coming to terms with losing fundamental ways of seeing that had hitherto provided a degree of certainty and security.
This grieving — and the challenges associated with deeper level unlearning — was identified in Rebecca’s own reflection:
I think sometimes unlearning is accompanied with a grief for the way that you've been acting up until this point … you're like, I can see something now. There was something that was just happening unconsciously, it's been brought into my conscious awareness. And yeah, that's something there that can be really confronting, and challenging.
It is important to recognise how difficult deep unlearning can be, given the instability it can cause in our mental models of the world. The narratives we create, our goals, dreams, hopes and aspirations are in large, culturally produced. And to find ourselves at odds with these (along with the systems that reinforce them), can be deeply confronting.
Is adapting to the generative AI landscape going to require unlearning at a significantly deeper level?
Everyone’s out for themselves. The get richer, the poor get poor, you know, 1% of people own the planet. It’s hard to pave your own way without stepping on other people to get up
-Sam, 27, Melbourne
It feels heavy and overwhelming. There’s a lot that I really don’t like about the way the world is heading. The raping and pillaging of the environment with no thought for future generations, or very little thought. The drastic imbalances in inequality between rich and poor that seem to just get bigger and bigger.
-Rebecca, 32, Melbourne
I feel a bit concerned for my children, but not in a way that I can do anything about because there are so many macro things happening. And however much we recycle, or buy the right type of washing up liquid, or whatever, is not actually going to make any difference on the macro scale
-Ian, 60, Melbourne
Maybe too much of this generative AI discourse is taken out of context.
Imagine if earlier this year, the letter from the Future of Life Institute posing a 6 month pause on all AI innovation was taken seriously. One may be skeptical to think it would ultimately change the way people like Sam, Rebecca and Ian are feeling about the direction the world is heading.
There seems to be almost weekly commentary from senior industry heads and organisations, talking about the impacts that AI will have on job markets. Some of the notable news bites have included DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman warning that government ‘seriously need to find solutions for people who lose their jobs to AI’ and hinting at the urgency of UBI, through to IBM reporting a hiring freeze on jobs that could be replaced by AI, estimating it could impact up to 7,800 roles.
It feels like this kind of dialogue and commentary is just a more tangible manifestation of our deep-seated insecurities about the present-day state of the world, in which we sense things are getting out of control, along with a growing sense of instability associated with the unsustainable nature of our systems.
If one applies a systems thinking approach to examine the wicked problems we presently face, there’s no doubt that advances in AI appear to have the potential to compound many structural issues, yet there is also the potential for technology to help us. On the environmental front, AI innovation has been occurring to better monitor methane emissions, measure environmental footprints and reduce ICT emissions amongst other things.
So in many respects, we have plenty of unlearning ahead of us that will need to take place in the world of work and with respect to our skills through the advent of AI in the mainstream. The technology is here, it will not disappear, and it would be folly to avoid embracing these tools, for ignoring or avoiding them would put individuals and organisations at risk of being left behind.
But at a higher level, if AI is proving to be an accelerator of the flux we find ourselves in today, it should inevitably serve as a catalyst (or perhaps an accelerator), in forcing us to collectively undergo a far more radical unlearning with respect to our ways of being.
Navigating the changes that will be thrust upon us in the coming years and decades will require a significant reconceptualisation of our ideas about what a healthy society and world look like, and a re-evaluation of our own aspirations and definitions of success.
From how we think about work and retirement, to how we understand our role and responsibility as active citizens, there are going to have to be some significant changes. And as always, at that deeper level, it will be emotional and challenging.
Further Reading
Hislop, D., Bosley, S., Coombs, C. R., & Holland, J. (2014). The process of individual unlearning: A neglected topic in an under-researched field. Management Learning, 45(5), 540–560.
Peschl, M.F (2019), “Unlearning towards an uncertain future: on the back end of future-driven unlearning”, The Learning Organization, Vol. 26 №5, pp. 454–469.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
