Unlearn to Lead : a New Skill to Scale
In a decade of disruption, what you know is only as valuable as your willingness to question it.
Under CEO John Donahoe, Nike made the choice to dramatically reduce its presence with wholesale partners like Foot Locker and Macy’s, pushing sales through its own direct channels instead. This was a playbook that had worked brilliantly in Donahoe’s previous contexts (eBay and ServicesNow). But it eroded Nike’s market share and after four years of stagnating sales, the company chose to replace its CEO and change strategy in September 2024. This is a story of a capable leader applying a mental model that had stopped fitting the context.
Some patterns serve us brilliantly for years and become the default, or the place the mind goes first. But the world changes and sometimes it is hard to see a pattern that stops working. This is not a failure of skill. It is a failure of unlearning.
In a decade where the nature of work, teams and leadership is shifting faster than most organisations can track, the ability to set aside what once worked is emerging as one of the most undervalued capabilities in the modern leader. Not just the ability to learn something new – but to consciously release a pattern, a habit or a mental model that is no longer serving the team. The University of Sydney’s 2026 Skills Horizon names Unlearning as a distinct capability in the era ahead.
Why Unlearning is so hard
The scale of the challenge is well documented. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 39% of workers’ core skills are expected to change by 2030 – and that the skills gap is now the single biggest barrier to business transformation, cited by 63% of employers globally. The implication is not just that people need to learn new things. It is that they need to let go of old ones.
Technical skills now carry a half-life of roughly 2.5 years – meaning the knowledge that made someone an expert five years ago may already be approaching obsolescence and about 40% of the global workforce might need reskilling within 3 years as a result of AI and automation (IBM’s Institute for Business Value research). More than ever, people need to learn because the rate of change now exceeds the rate of skill renewal.
It’s not surprising that 65% of AI users fear falling behind if they do not adapt, yet 45% admit it still feels safer to focus on current objectives (Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index). And this might be explained by the finding in the same report that only 13% of organisations explicitly reward reinventing the way work gets done. Old patterns are not just personal habits. They are often reinforced by the systems and culture built around them.
As expected, 7 in 10 business leaders now name agility as their primary competitive strategy. Yet the same leaders report that their biggest obstacle to executing that strategy is the internal architecture they have already built – the structures, roles and mental models designed for a different context (Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends). Vision points forward, but is supported by strategic and operating patterns that point somewhere different.
The University of Sydney’s 2026 Skills Horizon positions Unlearning as an essential skill to Think Through Complexity. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is quoted in the report saying: “I’m unlearning all the time. Because I believe that you’ve got to ask yourself every day, whether the way we’re doing things today is still the best, most effective, creative, interesting way to do it.”
The data indicates that in many cases the bottleneck is not capability to learn but the capacity to let go at scale.
What this looks like in practice
For coaches and L&D practitioners, unlearning means helping leaders and teams see where their automatic responses are working against them and building the discipline to pause, gain awareness, question and choose differently. Three practices are central to this work.
1 Surface the pattern before trying to change it
Unlearning begins with awareness. Leaders cannot set aside a pattern they cannot see. Facilitated conversations, psychometric tools and structured reflection exercises all serve the same function: making the invisible visible. A useful entry point is gaining awareness of how a leader works individually, in teams, as part of an organisation, then how decisions are made, and finally what behaviours and strategic goals are rewarded and encouraged.
2 Create conditions for a different response
Awareness and personal development without permission to act differently achieves little. Leaders need explicit signals that a new approach is welcome and that experimenting with one will not be penalised. This is where the facilitator’s role shifts from insight-delivery to support in environment design: building team agreements, supporting conversations for change with higher management, work on org-wide strategic pillars, reframing failure as data for optimisation and creating structured space to try new approaches. Without this, most leaders will have no choice but to slide back into the old pattern reinforced by their business.
3 Build reflection into the rhythm of work
Unlearning cannot be treated as a single event in time, like a half-day workshop to review process once a year. Unlearning requires repeated, low-stakes moments and continual feed: brief team check-ins that ask “did the system work or could things have gone better? How can we improve? Was anything redundant? Are we improving or stagnating?” And if some changes have been made it is important to revisit those new patterns and measure whether the change is performing as expected in practice or should be further refined.
How TMS tools support this capability
The TMS suite offers several tools that directly support the unlearning conversation, each addressing a different dimension of the challenge.
The Team Management Profile maps each person’s work preferences across the Types of Work Wheel which models the nine essential activities that every high-preforming team is expected to do. Where unlearning is concerned, the TMP is a starting point for understanding where autopilot is most active. Preferences are not static – but knowing which roles a leader or team gravitates toward by default opens the conversation about where deliberate choice could replace reflex. This is particularly important for leaders as their way of working will influence their whole team and model expectations.
The Opportunities-Obstacles Quotient (QO2) is arguably the most direct tool for unlearning conversations. It measures the ratio of attention individuals and teams give to opportunities compared with risks. Leaders with a more obstacle-focused thinking, often reinforced over years in risk-averse environments, can be more cautious of change and rely heavily on past successes to navigate decision-making. The QO2 creates the framework for balancing each side of the opportunity/obstacle scale in five key areas.
The Window on Work Values (WoWV) goes deeper still. Where the TMP identifies where autopilot is most active and the QO2 reveals how attention is oriented, the WoWV surfaces the layer that sustains the pattern: core work values. Unlearning a behaviour without surfacing the underlying value tends to produce temporary change at best. The WoWV creates the conversation that goes to the root, helping leaders distinguish between personal values and the strategic values in their organisation. Organisations carry values profile, often embedded in culture and practice, that shapes what behaviours get reinforced, rewarded and sustained over time. The WoWV creates a practical starting point for examining whether that personal profile is aligned with the organisation’s strategic intent. A safety-critical or highly regulated environment, for instance, requires compliance and risk vigilance as non-negotiables. Introducing autonomy-building into that context is likely to create confusion rather than capability. The value of surfacing organisational values allows awareness in leaders so they can stretch out of their personal ones and might find patterns that are strategically conflicting and need to be unlearned in that context.
The Unlearning ceiling
Individual leaders can build the unlearning capacity. Teams can practice it. But if the organisation’s culture, incentive structures or leadership signals reward institutional memory above all else, the work will hit a ceiling.
Microsoft’s research found only 13% of organisations currently reward people for reinventing how work gets done. That means in 87% of workplaces, the implicit message running beneath any leadership development investment is: learn new things, but keep operating the way we always have. Unlearning in that context is not just difficult – it is actively discouraged.
Building an unlearning culture requires organisations to do three things consistently: celebrate the decision to do something differently, not just the outcome; tolerate intelligent failure (particularly in early attempts at new approaches); and create visible signals from senior leadership that the old playbook is not sacred. All three levels have to be designed into how performance is measured, how teams are led and how learning is positioned across the organisation.
Scaling the unlearning habit with TeamOS
Scaling an unlearning capability across a leadership cohort and the rest of the organisation requires consistent, lightweight touchpoints that keep the reflection habit alive between formal interventions.
TeamOS brings this into the day-to-day with Oski, the AI coaching interface that supports teams and leaders to reflect on how they are working individually and together using each member’s psychometric data. AI coaching can be an important partner in this culture of awareness, development, testing and reinforcement endeavor that is needed for effective Unlearning, as it is a scalable, affordable and accessible tool.
For L&D teams and coaches, TeamOS provides the connective tissue between facilitated sessions keeping the development conversation alive at the frequency the growth actually requires.
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If you found this article useful and are looking to build this conversation into your practice, or to design an organisational program around the future of work capabilities we would love to support you.
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Sources:
- WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025
- IBM Institute for Business Value | How is AI changing work
- Microsoft Work Trend Index 2026
- Deloitte 2026 Global Human Capital Trends
- University of Sydney 2026 Skills Horizon
- HBR | To Lead Through Uncertainty, Unlearn Your Assumptions
- Yale School of Management | When Companies Forget Who They Are
- CNBC | Nike CEO John Donahoe