When my daughter was finishing school, we had the big conversations about what came next. What should she study? What skills would she actually need?
It was forty-odd years since I'd had the same conversation. The difference was startling.
In my day it was the three R's. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Now? Critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication. Working with ideas across platforms and disciplines. Being able to tell a good source from a dodgy one.
There's a line Alvin Toffler made famous that I keep coming back to: "The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
He was talking about our kids. I think he was talking about us.
Disruption doesn't just happen to businesses
We talk a lot about the pace of change. AI, markets shifting under our feet, customers who want something different from what they wanted three years ago. Most of us are adapting our businesses all the time in response.
But disruption doesn't only happen to organisations. It happens to people.
Most businesses in this country are owned and led by people over forty. People who learned business in a different era. People who, if we're honest, are carrying some mental models that fitted a slower world better than this one.
That's not a problem. Unless you refuse to notice it.
What unlearning actually looks like
I caught myself laughing out loud at myself a while back. I was looking for someone to put my website together, and I was chatting to a younger guy about it. He looked at me like I was mad. He told me he'd used Claude to build his website on Netlify.
Two hours later, my new website was up! What used to cost $10k and take ten weeks now costs next to nothing and takes two hours.
The temptation in that moment is to defend yourself. Yes, but...
The better move is to notice the urge to defend, and ask yourself a straight question. Am I defending this because it's right, or because I don't want to be wrong?
Two very different things.
The picture in your head
Here's where it gets interesting for anyone leading a team.
What we see, plus the story we tell ourselves about what we see, becomes our reality. Call it the picture in your head of how the business works. Who your customers really are. What you're good at. What matters.
If that picture is out of date, new information doesn't help. You just slot it into the old frame and carry on. The facts change. The picture doesn't.
Now multiply that by everyone on your leadership team.
Every manager is carrying their own picture of the business. Most of them were accurate once. Some of them were formed years ago, in a business that doesn't exist any more. And here's the kicker: nobody announces when their picture goes out of date. It just quietly drifts.
So you roll out a new strategy, and it doesn't land. It looks like a people problem, or poor execution. More often it's people measuring the new plan against an old picture, and it simply doesn't add up for them.
Learning, unlearning and relearning isn't just a personal discipline. It's a team one.
Step back from the frame
The leaders and owners I see doing well right now have learned to step back from the frame. Not just asking what's happening? but what lens am I using to make sense of what's happening?
And then asking the same of their team. Out loud. In the room.
That's an uncomfortable conversation. People are attached to their pictures, me included. But it's a lot less uncomfortable than spending a year executing a plan half your team doesn't actually believe in.
Better together
The most reliable shortcut I've found for unlearning is other people.
Not just any people. The right ones. A mix of leaders, owners, advisors and peers wrestling with the same questions from different angles, who'll tell you straight when your thinking is out of date. The research on forecasting is pretty clear that small, diverse groups make better calls than lone experts. The trick is genuine diversity of view, not a room full of people who all see the world the same way you do.
And be a meerkat. Pause. Stand up. Look around. Read, watch, listen, in whatever way works for you. If it feels like a chore, you won't keep doing it.
The moment you stop scanning, you start falling behind.
The short version
The world is moving too fast to run on what you already know. The playbook that got you here may not get you there. So stay curious, stay humble, and stay close to people who'll tell you when your picture's out of date.
Then get your team doing the same.
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn.
Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!
