Barry O'Reilly opened with the question of how the Roman Empire — a startup at Seven Hills in central Europe over 2,000 years ago — grew into a civilization that at its peak accounted for roughly one-fifth of the world's population and covered over 2,000 square kilometers. The audience, when he asks this question in person, typically offers the standard answers: roads, aqueducts, governmental systems, military discipline.
The leading hypothesis, according to Barry, is none of those. It's that as Rome conquered or incorporated new territories, as soon as the Romans found practices better than their own, they let go of their existing practices and incorporated the new ones. They had to let go of what had made them successful to continue achieving extraordinary results. They had to unlearn.
The session that followed made the case that unlearning isn't just a historical curiosity. It's the discipline most leaders need now and the one most leaders are worst at. Barry walked through the framework he developed from coaching hundreds of executives — the Cycle of Unlearning — and grounded it in working examples from International Airlines Group, T-Mobile under John Legere, Amazon, and NASA after the Columbia disaster. The framing throughout was practical rather than theoretical. The premise was that the same expertise that produced past success becomes the constraint that limits future success, and that the discipline of letting go of obsolete behaviors is now as important as the discipline of acquiring new ones.
The book "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" had recently been published. The session was Barry's working introduction to the framework for the KaiNexus webinar audience.
Barry O'Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. He works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek to invent the future rather than fear it.
Barry is the author of "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" and co-author of the international bestseller "Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale," included in the Eric Ries series and recognized as a Harvard Business Review must-read for CEOs and business leaders. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review.
Barry is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity's executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco and throughout the globe. He is the founder of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and the management consultancy Antennae. His mission is to help purposeful, technology-led businesses innovate at scale.
The concept of unlearning isn't new. Barry traced it back through the management literature. Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline" launched the concept of learning organizations and systems thinking in the 1990s, and executives flew to prestigious universities to spend weeks in classrooms learning how to become learning organizations. The idea was the vogue of the time.
But before Senge, in 1981, Bo Henley had written something most readers missed. Henley's observation: while learning is important, organizations also need to develop the skill to continuously unlearn. As knowledge grows, it also becomes obsolete as reality changes. What organizations need isn't just a system that lets them acquire new knowledge but also a system that lets them discard obsolete or misleading knowledge that no longer applies to the situation they're now in.
The companies that took this seriously over the following decades are mostly the companies that now dominate their industries. The companies that didn't — that built moats around big business models and protected what had worked — are mostly the ones that got disrupted. Barry's framing: companies that invested in building platforms allowing them to learn at higher velocity and higher accuracy about what their customers used and didn't use, and to continuously learn and unlearn what had made them successful, rapidly started changing the world.
The leadership pattern that traps most executives is what Barry called the incremental view. The things that worked yesterday will work tomorrow, slightly improved. Management thinking is linear. The world they're operating in is exponential. The gap between the two opens up faster than incremental thinking can close, and that's where the disruption appears.
He quoted Gary Hamel's observation that today we have 21st-century internet-enabled business processes managed by mid-20th-century management processes, all built on top of 19th-century management principles. The failure isn't technological. It's a failure to unlearn.
One of the framing shifts Barry made early in the session is worth sitting with. When people talk about disruption, they typically talk about businesses being disrupted. Barry's reframe: it's not businesses that get disrupted. It's individuals.
Businesses are collections of individuals. Each individual has behaviors the way a product has features. If you're not continuously innovating your behaviors, you end up using behaviors that nobody finds useful anymore — behaviors that were relevant in a context that no longer exists. The disruption that hits the company is the cumulative effect of many individuals operating with obsolete behaviors.
This framing matters because it locates the responsibility somewhere actionable. A leader can't single-handedly transform an entire organization. A leader can examine and change their own behavior, which then makes the organization's transformation possible.
Barry defined the term carefully because the audience reaction he often gets is defensive — "so you're telling me everything I know is no longer relevant?" The answer is no. Nothing in his framework requires discarding everything.
His working definition: unlearning is the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively engaging in taking in new information to inform effective decision-making in action.
The concept is that you need a system to continuously recognize which behaviors are working and driving the outcomes you want, and which behaviors are obsolete and should be let go to make space for new behaviors. It's not abandonment. It's curation.
What Barry found in coaching scaling companies in San Francisco and global corporate executives elsewhere was that the ability to learn wasn't the limiting factor in higher performance. Learning is something most executives can do. The limiting factor was the inability to let go of behaviors that had previously produced success. Knowing what to release, and being willing to release it, turned out to be the harder skill.
The framework Barry developed from his coaching practice has three steps.
Recognize that you need to unlearn. The first step is being clear about what outcome you're trying to achieve and recognizing that your current behaviors, thinking, methods, or strategies aren't actually driving that outcome. Several signals indicate the moment for unlearning has arrived: you're not living up to the expectations you have of yourself; you're struggling with a problem and have tried all the methods you know without producing the result; the outcomes that mattered yesterday aren't moving anymore even though you're applying the same approach.
Relearn. Once you've identified the outcome you're aiming for, create a safe environment where you can experiment with new behaviors to see which work and which don't. The relearning step is fundamentally about experimentation. You're not committing to a new approach. You're testing approaches against the outcome you're trying to drive.
Breakthrough. Reflect on the results you're getting from the new behaviors and the behaviors you've let go. Use the data from the experiments to determine whether the new behaviors are producing the outcomes you wanted. The breakthrough isn't a permanent state. It's a moment of confirmed learning that becomes the platform for the next cycle.
Barry was emphatic that the cycle isn't one-and-done. It's a system. The more someone runs the cycle, the more their capacity for behavioral adaptation compounds. Unlearning becomes an accelerant rather than a one-time event. The capacity itself is what gets developed over time.
Barry identified four traits that anyone serious about unlearning has to cultivate.
Curiosity. How open are you to new information that conflicts with your existing mental models? Barry's diagnostic question: when's the last time you asked someone on your team to perform a task you've completed before, and their initial approach was radically different from how you would have done it? Did you stop them and tell them the "right" way, or were you curious to understand why they tackled it differently? The answer tells you how open you actually are to new information.
Ownership. When you're not achieving the outcomes you want, what's your natural reaction? Do you point at other people — "we'd succeed if that other team did what I wanted them to do"? Or do you own the results and recognize that if you want to change the outcomes, you have to change your own behavior? Ownership isn't about blame. It's about locating the agency for change somewhere you can actually exercise it.
Commitment. The willingness to keep trying new things even when they're uncomfortable. Unlearning requires a deliberate practice of experimentation that runs counter to natural habits. Without commitment, the practice fades back into the comfortable patterns.
Comfortable being uncomfortable. Growth happens at the edge of the comfort zone — Barry's image was your feet just barely touching the bottom of the beach while floating in the water. That's where the work is. Not safely on shore, not drowning in the deep water. The edge.
The mechanism that makes all four traits workable is psychological safety. Without safety, curiosity gets punished, ownership becomes blame, commitment fades under pressure, and discomfort becomes intolerable. With safety, all four become operational.
Barry spent time on what he called the most underexamined part of executive development: the way most leaders try to learn doesn't work.
The current global spend on executive development is roughly $365 billion per year. Less than 25% of executives say the programs they attend produce the outcomes they wanted. Three out of four don't see the result they were promised. By any reasonable standard, the existing executive education industry has a substantial unlearning problem of its own.
Barry's diagnosis: most executive education is designed around sitting in a room and being told to think differently. Telling people to think differently doesn't work. People will sit in the room, nod, return to work, and act exactly the same way they did before. The information enters the cognitive layer without reaching the behavioral layer.
His alternative: if you want to shift mindset, don't try to get people to think differently. Get people to start acting differently. New behavior gives a different perspective. Acting differently produces new information. The new information runs against existing assumptions and starts to test them. The mindset shifts in response to the behavioral evidence, not in response to verbal persuasion.
This is the principle underneath ExecCamp, the company Barry founded. Take executives out of their business for an extended period — sometimes two weeks, sometimes eight — with the goal of launching new businesses that disrupt their existing business. The point isn't only the businesses that get launched. The point is the experience of operating differently, which disrupts the calcified behaviors that had become invisible to the executives themselves.
The most extended case study in the session was Barry's work with International Airlines Group, the holding company for British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia, and several other carriers. IAG is the sixth-largest airline company in the world, with roughly 63,000 employees.
Barry took six senior executives out of the business for eight weeks. The goal: launch new businesses to disrupt the airline industry and IAG itself.
The first lesson came in the first session. One of the executives had a confident idea for how to transform the airline industry, grounded in his 20 years of expertise. Barry's instruction: go test it with a real customer. The executive presented his idea to a customer. The customer didn't understand it. The executive's reaction: wrong customer, get me another one. Same result. He went through the cycle four or five times — explaining his idea to customers, watching customers fail to understand it, asking Barry for new customers.
After the fifth attempt, Barry sat down with the executive and asked him to reflect on what was happening. The executive came to the realization himself. "It's not the customer. It's me. It's the idea. Instead of pushing my ideas onto customers, I should be pulling information from them."
The moment was the activation of curiosity. The executive's expertise had been functioning as a limit on what he could see. His assumptions about what customers wanted had been operating as certainties. The reframe — these aren't certainties, they're hypotheses to be tested — opened up a different way of working. The executive went on to become one of the best experimenters Barry worked with during the program.
The propagation was the other half of the story. Two months after the program, the executive emailed Barry. One of his team members had come into his office asking him to sign off on a new product they were going to launch. The executive's response: "Why are you asking me? Test it. You should be at the airport getting customers to test it. Get them to sign it off."
The behavior had become contagious. The executive's own unlearning had created the conditions for his team to start operating the same way.
The IAG case had a second act that's worth attention because it shows a different kind of unlearning happening at the organizational level.
The eight-week ExecCamp produced substantial innovation. The team developed the first identity management system for blockchain in the airline industry. They created complaint processing systems that took minutes instead of months. The ideas were strong.
The next step was supposed to be obvious: push the ideas back into IAG, where the operating teams would pick them up and execute. That assumption produced what Barry called "a disastrous scenario where we essentially took a whole lot of money and just burnt it on the runway." The operating teams already had full backlogs of their own ideas. They had no capacity for the imported initiatives. The push-mode strategy that the executives had unlearned in their customer interactions had reproduced itself at the organizational level.
The team unlearned again. Rather than pushing ideas into IAG, they created Hangar 51 — the first venture capital firm in the airline industry. The model: make IAG's assets, data, and skills available to external startups. Let the startups build their own products and services on top of those assets. Take an equity stake in the startups in exchange. The result was that IAG got the innovation capabilities of startups paired with the scale capabilities of an enterprise. The two operating models complemented each other rather than fighting each other.
Steven Scott, Chief Innovation Officer at IAG at the time, captured the pattern in a line Barry returned to: when 97% of people say you should stop doing what you're doing, that's when the breakthrough is just about to happen, and you need to increase your velocity of experimentation rather than stop.
The second extended example came from Barry's work with an unnamed major phone manufacturer. The leadership team had developed a business strategy they were confident would work — twenty years of industry expertise behind it. They couldn't understand why the results weren't materializing.
Barry's intervention: create a scenario where the leadership team could safely test their assumptions about how the strategy actually worked from the customer side. He gave five senior leaders credit cards loaded with enough money to sign up for their own service under the company's standard terms — connect any customer in under two hours.
The result: only one of the five was able to sign up within the strategy constraints. One other came close but failed. Three failed outright.
The leaders' first reaction was the predictable one. The employee they encountered hadn't served them right. The ticketing machine wasn't working. The store was running a process that didn't match what they had specified. They were angry at the operators.
Barry pushed them to own the results. The strategy was theirs. The rollout was theirs. The result wasn't the operators' fault. The result was telling them that their assumptions about how the strategy would land in practice were wrong, and that the strategy needed to be revised based on what they had just learned.
The unlearning moment was the leaders becoming customers of their own products. The information they got from that experience was qualitatively different from the information they got from internal reports. The reports had been sanitized through the layers of the organization. The direct experience hadn't been.
Barry connected the phone manufacturer story to a broader pattern using John Legere's tenure as CEO of T-Mobile.
When Legere took the job, the standard CEO approach would have been to consume reports from the leadership team, take recommendations on what to fix, and act on internal information. Legere did none of that. He had a phone line installed in his office and spent four hours a day for an extended period listening to customer complaints directly.
What he heard was that customers were struggling with the basic mechanics of being mobile customers — nobody understood their data plans, nobody knew how much their bill was going to be, the cost surprises were eroding the relationship. In a commoditized industry where the only way to win is taking market share from competitors, this was actionable information.
Based on what he heard, Legere launched the "Un-carrier" program. Fixed monthly fees. Known data allowances. Predictable bills. The market responded immediately. T-Mobile started gathering customers from competitors. Legere kept iterating — shredding two-year service contracts in March 2013, offering iPhone trial programs when new models launched, and continuously listening to what customers were experiencing.
Barry's framing of the pattern: know-it-all to learn-it-all. The expertise that had defined Legere's industry standing was less valuable than his willingness to receive new information directly from the source. The unlearning was about how he gathered information, not about what he knew.
The same pattern appears in Amazon's approach. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, presented at the AWS re:Invent conference that 95% of Amazon's features and services are built on customer feedback. They aren't pushing services onto customers. They're pulling services from customers. The pattern is structural at Amazon — the company is organized around it.
The final extended example came from Barry's work with NASA after the Columbia disaster.
The Columbia space mission broke apart on reentry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The earlier Challenger disaster in 1986 had set the precedent: when something goes wrong at NASA, the failure mode is often catastrophic. The Columbia investigation revealed substantial organizational issues with how NASA shared information about mistakes that had been observed during the mission.
Dr. Ed Hoffman was the Chief Knowledge Officer at NASA. Hoffman's observation, which Barry quoted: when you have lots of smart people, they usually have to fail really big before it becomes important for them to change. Smart people are used to being right. They aren't used to sharing mistakes. The reluctance to share is the structural problem.
The reframe Barry and Hoffman worked on: mistakes are new information. They show that your assumptions weren't what you actually believed. If you can create systems that easily share mistakes across an organization, you give people the best available information for making the best decisions. The mistake becomes an organizational asset rather than an individual liability.
Barry referenced Edgar Schein's framing of the two levers that drive behavior change. Survival anxiety — the shock that something has to change or the organization will fail — works for a while, then maxes out. The threat of disruption can be communicated for only so long before people tune it out. The lever that produces durable change is reducing learning anxiety — making it safe for people to try new things, share mistakes, experiment, and grow.
The Aristotle Project at Google found the same thing. Google studied what made high-performance teams. The number one indicator wasn't smartness, knowledge depth, or individual capability. It was psychological safety — how safe the team members felt taking risks, being vulnerable, and sharing mistakes in front of one another.
The pyramid Barry described: small mistakes happen in any system. Some mistakes turn into mishaps where the system functions but a failure occurs. Some mishaps cascade into catastrophic failures. The work of an organization is to capture and share mistakes before they become mishaps and before mishaps become catastrophic failures.
Hoffman and Barry created a structure at NASA for senior leaders across departments to meet regularly and each share one mistake they had made — and how catching the mistake had led to avoiding a mishap or catastrophe. The leaders sharing modeled the behavior for their teams. The information started to flow across the silos that had previously kept the mistakes locked inside individual departments.
NASA does an additional practice now to keep complacency from setting in. Less than 40% of NASA employees were present during the Challenger and Columbia disasters. To keep survival anxiety alive for the people who weren't there, NASA shuts down on January 26 each year — the anniversary of one of the disasters — and invites the families and friends of the astronauts who died to share their stories. The point isn't morbid. The point is that complacency is itself a risk, and the structural practice of remembering keeps the operational discipline of mistake-sharing connected to the human stakes.
Barry's closing practical advice was about how to actually begin unlearning rather than just thinking about it.
His exercise: identify a current challenge or aspiration. Write it down. Find someone you trust in your network and ask them, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well your current behavior is driving you toward that outcome. They give you a score — say, 7. Ask them what one thing you could do to make yourself half a point better. Just half a point. One new behavior to try or one existing behavior to stop.
Whatever they suggest, experiment with it for a week. Check back with them at the end of the week. Ask them where you are now. The system of unlearning starts running. You've described the outcome. You're testing a new behavior. You're getting feedback. You're iterating. The cycle is small enough to fit into a normal week. The cycle is real enough to produce real change.
The pattern Barry kept returning to: think big about the aspiration, but start small. Smaller than you think. The smaller the experiment, the safer the failure. The safer the failure, the more experiments you can run. The more experiments you can run, the faster you learn what works.
Serena Williams was Barry's example of someone applying this principle at the highest level. He noted that she reads "Unlearn" and uses it as part of how she keeps adapting at a stage in her career where most athletes have plateaued. The principle scales. The deliberate practice of unlearning is what keeps performance climbing rather than stabilizing.
The final framing he offered: choose courage over comfort. Try the behaviors that are uncomfortable. Don't let yourself settle into the comfortable patterns. And make it safe — for yourself and for the people you lead — to experiment, fail, and learn. The cycle compounds when the safety is real. The cycle stalls when the safety is performed.
The work Barry described is fundamentally about how leaders change their own behaviors and create the conditions for their organizations to do the same. None of it is software. The Cycle of Unlearning is a personal practice that scales into an organizational practice through deliberate leadership behavior.
Where infrastructure connects is in two places.
The first is supporting the experimentation that the Cycle of Unlearning requires. Experiments need to be captured, tracked, and revisited. A leader running their own small behavioral experiments week to week can use a notebook. A team running coordinated experiments across many improvement initiatives needs infrastructure that holds the experiments alongside the operational data, so the team can see what was tried, what was learned, and what to try next. Without that infrastructure, the experimentation that the framework calls for tends to fade back into anecdote rather than building into accumulated organizational learning.
The second is supporting the visibility of mistakes that the NASA story argued for. The framework requires mistakes to be shared across the organization so they don't become mishaps and mishaps don't become catastrophic failures. Sharing mistakes requires somewhere for the mistakes to live — a place where they can be captured, categorized, and made visible to people who would benefit from knowing about them. The leaders' practice of sharing mistakes at the senior level only scales if there's infrastructure that lets the practice propagate beyond the meeting where the leaders gathered.
The psychological safety that Project Aristotle identified as the key factor in high-performance teams is itself partly a function of infrastructure. When people see that the mistakes they report get acted on, that their improvement ideas get tracked through completion, and that their contributions are visible to the organization, the safety becomes operationally real rather than aspirational. Infrastructure that connects the act of speaking up to visible action is what converts the psychological safety from a value statement into a working practice.
The customer-pull pattern Barry returned to — Amazon's 95% of features built on customer feedback, John Legere's direct customer listening, the IAG executives finally learning to pull rather than push — also benefits from infrastructure that captures customer signals, makes them visible to the people who can act on them, and tracks the loop from signal to action to result. The pull discipline requires the signal capture to be operational rather than dependent on individual heroics.
None of this changes what Barry was teaching. The Cycle of Unlearning is the framework. The four characteristics are the characteristics. The think-big-start-small principle is the principle. What infrastructure does is preserve the integrity of the practice across the time horizons and organizational scale that real unlearning requires — which is years rather than weeks, and many people coordinating rather than one leader practicing alone.
What does "unlearning" actually mean? The conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively engaging in taking in new information to inform effective decision-making in action. Barry was careful to clarify that it doesn't mean discarding everything you know. It means having a system to continuously recognize which behaviors are working and driving the outcomes you want, and which behaviors are obsolete and should be let go to make space for new behaviors. It's curation, not abandonment.
Why is unlearning becoming more important now? Because the rate of change has accelerated faster than the management models that govern most organizations. Gary Hamel's framing, which Barry quoted: today we have 21st-century internet-enabled business processes managed by mid-20th-century management processes, all built on top of 19th-century management principles. The legacy models worked in a more stable environment. They don't work as well when the underlying conditions are changing exponentially. Leaders who can't unlearn the legacy assumptions are operating with outdated maps.
What is the Cycle of Unlearning? A three-step framework Barry developed from coaching hundreds of executives. Recognize that you need to unlearn — get clear on the outcome you're aiming for and recognize that your current approach isn't driving it. Relearn — create a safe environment to experiment with new behaviors and see which work. Breakthrough — reflect on the results, use the data to determine whether the new behaviors are producing the outcomes you wanted, and start the next cycle. The framework isn't one-and-done. It's a system that compounds over time as the practitioner's capacity for behavioral adaptation grows.
Why does Barry say disruption is personal before it's organizational? Because businesses are collections of individuals, and each individual has behaviors that are either current or obsolete. The cumulative effect of many individuals operating with obsolete behaviors is what makes an organization vulnerable to disruption. A leader can't single-handedly transform an entire organization, but a leader can examine and change their own behavior, which makes the organization's transformation possible. The framing locates the responsibility somewhere actionable.
What four characteristics make unlearning possible? Curiosity — how open you are to new information that conflicts with your existing mental models. Ownership — recognizing that if you want different outcomes, you have to change your own behavior, not blame others. Commitment — the willingness to keep trying new things even when they're uncomfortable. Comfortable being uncomfortable — operating at the edge of your comfort zone, where growth actually happens. All four require psychological safety to be operational.
Why does Barry say "you can't think your way into a new way of acting"? Because telling people to think differently produces nodding agreement followed by unchanged behavior. The cognitive layer can absorb the message without the behavioral layer being affected. The mechanism that actually works is the reverse: get people to act differently first. New behavior produces new experience. New experience produces new information. The new information tests the existing assumptions. The mindset shifts in response to the behavioral evidence, not in response to verbal persuasion.
What was the IAG story illustrating? Two distinct unlearning moments. First, an executive learning that his industry expertise was operating as a constraint — he was pushing his ideas onto customers rather than pulling information from them, and his assumptions were preventing him from seeing what customers actually needed. The reframe activated his curiosity and changed how he worked. Second, the team learning that pushing innovations from ExecCamp into the existing operating teams didn't work, and pivoting to Hangar 51 — a venture capital model that paired startup innovation capability with enterprise scale capability. Same pattern at two different scales.
What was the phone manufacturer story illustrating? The danger of leadership operating from assumptions about how their strategy lands in practice, without testing those assumptions directly. Five senior leaders tried to sign up for their own service under their company's standard terms. Three failed outright. The initial reaction was to blame the operators. The actual lesson was that the strategy the leaders had designed wasn't operationally viable. The unlearning moment was the leaders becoming customers of their own products and getting information that internal reports had been sanitizing away.
What was the John Legere story illustrating? The know-it-all to learn-it-all shift. Most CEOs consume reports and listen to internal recommendations. Legere installed a phone line in his office and listened to customer complaints four hours a day. Based on what he heard, he launched the Un-carrier program that took market share from competitors. The lesson isn't about Legere's individual brilliance. It's about how he gathered information. The unlearning was about the input channel, not about the analytical horsepower applied to the input.
Why does Amazon build 95% of its features on customer feedback? Because the alternative — building features based on internal assumptions about what customers want — produces lower hit rates. The structural commitment to pulling features from customers rather than pushing features onto customers is what allows Amazon to keep out-innovating competitors. The pattern requires infrastructure (capture mechanisms, signal-to-action workflows) and discipline (treating customer feedback as the primary source of feature direction). Both are organizational choices, not technical ones.
What was the NASA story illustrating? That mistakes are information, and that organizations need systems to share mistakes before they become mishaps and before mishaps become catastrophic failures. Smart organizations have a particular failure mode: smart people don't share mistakes because they're used to being right. Ed Hoffman and Barry created a structure where senior leaders shared mistakes regularly across departments, which propagated the practice through the rest of the organization. The supporting practice — shutting down NASA on January 26 each year and inviting families of the astronauts who died to share stories — keeps complacency from undermining the discipline. Both pieces matter.
What's the connection between psychological safety and unlearning? Psychological safety is the prerequisite. Without it, curiosity gets punished, ownership becomes blame, commitment fades, and discomfort becomes intolerable. The Project Aristotle study at Google found that psychological safety was the number one indicator of high-performance teams — not individual capability, not collective expertise, but how safe the team members felt taking risks and being vulnerable. The Aristotle Project's finding isn't soft. It's structural. Teams without psychological safety can't run the experiments that unlearning requires.
What does Edgar Schein's distinction between learning anxiety and survival anxiety mean? Survival anxiety is the lever that says something has to change or the organization will fail. It works for a while, then maxes out — people can only be shocked by the threat of disruption so many times before they tune it out. Learning anxiety is the lever that says how safe people feel trying new things. Reducing learning anxiety is what produces durable behavior change. The pattern Barry advocated: don't rely on survival anxiety as the primary driver; invest in reducing learning anxiety so that experimentation becomes the default.
What's the simplest way to start unlearning today? Identify a current challenge or aspiration. Write it down. Find someone you trust and ask them, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well your current behavior is driving you toward that outcome. They give you a score. Ask them what one thing you could do to make yourself half a point better. Try whatever they suggest for a week. Check back with them. The cycle is small enough to fit into a normal week and real enough to produce real change. Think big about the aspiration; start small with the experiment.
Why does Barry emphasize starting smaller than people think they should? Because the smaller the experiment, the safer the failure. The safer the failure, the more experiments you can run. The more experiments you can run, the faster you learn what works. The principle is the same as the principle behind small tests of change in PDCA or hypothesis testing in scientific method — and it's the same principle behind Amazon's deployment cadence (in 2011, Amazon was deploying software every 11 seconds, which meant they were learning something new about their business every 11 seconds). Speed and safety scale together when the experiments are small enough.
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