Unlearning old patterns of behavior is vital for innovation. Unlearning how to create documents in a program that runs on your PC is difficult. Unlearning how to email these documents as attachments is perhaps even more so. Unlearning is critical to untangling ourselves from “stone age tactics” (as I’ve recently heard emailing attachments referred to) for knowledge creation and distribution.

The nice thing about unlearning is that the eventual learning of the replacement approach takes significantly less effort. Digging around for ideas on unlearning, I turned up this fascinating white paper on unlearning as it related to innovation. Of note, the best ways the authors suggest to unlearn are:

“But, how do we unlearn? Five steps seem to be essential. We need to:
1) Create space for thinking
2) Play with ideas
3) Dare to believe that the impossible ideas might be true
4) Adapt the ideas to useful contexts
5) Take action, despite objections of experts and authorities.”

Wikis and web-based collaboration capabilities, when granted to employees within an enterprise, provide a “space for thinking” that has never been broadly available to them. Unlearning becomes critical when one realizes that to take advantage of these tools, one must unlearn how they’ve learned to operate in a business environment, moving out of the what the typical knowledge worker considers their comfort zone. It’s a critical part of the adoption cycle for collaboration tools, and should be considered carefully during any deployment effort.